Table of Contents

Dedication

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

AMBER

COTTONWOOD

This book is dedicated to my father.

Copyright © 2012 by Robin Smith

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

Purplhouse@yahoo.com

This book is a work of fiction.  Names, places, locales and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events are purely coincidental.

Cover designed by Sarah-Jane Lehoux

CHAPTER ONE

It was almost seven o’clock on a Wednesday morning, which found Sarah Fowler sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading the help-wanted ads and singing under her breath in no particular key. This morning’s serenade was an actual song and a fairly new one at that, but it could have been anything, really. She hadn’t done anything as deliberate as ‘pick’ it. She didn’t even know she was doing it.

“Love is easy when it’s the first time,” Sarah droned as Kate rushed in and out again in search of a missing earring. Kate was always losing things and late for something. Like Sarah’s own monotonous singing, it was a trait which had long ago faded into the background. She noticed only that her sister had become intermittently present and so she got up to fix her a cup of coffee, black and bitter because Kate liked to torture herself that way, and to freshen her own, with plenty of powdered creamer and stale sugar because Sarah did not. “Love shines with its own light. Love mends what life has broken…” With Kate’s coffee mug conspicuously placed on the cheap table, the newspaper reclaimed her attention. Sarah settled back into her chair. “…and warms you through the night…oh well.”

There were no jobs this morning, at least none that Sarah qualified for. Her duty done (not without her daily twinge of guilt), Sarah picked up the rest of the paper and started reading it for real. Concentration rendered her relentless singing to a slow mutter, but did not kill it. “Love brightens…every color…Love makes everything…seem new, but…love is, love is, love is…” She paused for a sip and a closer inspection of the front page splash-photo, where firemen tromped through the smoldering ruin of some convenience store that had gone up over the weekend. “…love is…love is…love is…” She didn’t recognize any of them. Relieved, she moved on. “…love is…love is…”

“Dangerous!” Kate bellowed from the bathroom.

Sarah looked up, blinking. “Huh?”

“Nothing. God.” Kate ran into the bedroom. “Read your paper.”

Sarah did. After a few seconds, she took another sip of sweet, creamy coffee. A few seconds after that, she began to sing under her breath. “You only kiss me when I’m bleeding…”

It was a slow news day for The Brookings Bugle, not that there was ever much excitement in this part of Oregon. Brookings was really nothing but a train station and a few cross-streets, two bars, a feed store, and six churches, conveniently located eighty miles from Portland—or anywhere else for that matter—and Sarah was not surprised to see that this morning’s top story was more concerned muttering about the president’s proposed environmental bill. Below that, the usual small-town scandals ate up space, and way down at the bottom, squeezed in under the proposed overhaul of the Brookings Sanitation Department and how it impacted the current recycling program, was the article that changed everything.

“Oh wow,” said Sarah, interrupting her droning song to stare down at the newspaper in happy surprise.

“What is it?” Kate asked, finally rushing into the kitchen to gulp down her by-now cooled coffee. When no answer was forthcoming, her big sister leaned over the table to look for herself. She shuddered once, elaborately. “God, those things are creepy.”

Sarah ignored her and hunched protectively over the dining room table, as if to spare the newspaper further insult. She read, her chin propped on the hand that didn’t hold her morning coffee, fascinated. Delighted, even.

Cottonwood Latest to Adopt Controversial Social Reform Policy, said the tagline, but it was the picture that was the real story. A real photo, an official photo, not some grainy, illicit thing snapped off someone’s cell phone. The alien which was its subject was in full color, but tantalizingly small—just a head shot, looking back over its plated shoulder carapace and directly into the camera, those weirdly human eyes light and alive and furious above that spidery, crabbish mouth. The article itself was a casual affair, an afterthought of information. But of course, the aliens weren’t really news anymore. They’d been here almost twenty years.

There were thirteen immigration camps worldwide (with three more under construction, the article reminded her), but even the press agents at the International Bureau of Immigration acknowledged they functioned as little more than holding pens. “Overcrowding is still our biggest problem and the safety of the residents and the surrounding community will always be our top concern,” as some important poobah or another was quoted. “But our goal is integration and we are excited to finally be taking the next steps towards that goal. We hope at least some of you will come with us.”

A little thrill went through Sarah’s spine as she read those words again. She was actually old enough to remember when the aliens arrived, although only just. She’d been four, after all. No one remembered much from four.

The article rambled on for another line or three, talking about how outdated the earliest camps were and the need for stronger containment measures and security, then got back to the interesting bits, saying that IBI’s Human Resource department was now committed to providing their residents with a liaison and support services so that their needs could be better identified and addressed. This, the article concluded, opened up a whopping half-million jobs in the United States alone, although the author ended with a not-so-subtle speculation that this was a job perhaps better suited for the military, owing to the tremendous danger presented by the residents themselves. The idea that citizens—untrained, uneducated citizens—could actually work inside Cottonwood ought to be a deeply disturbing one to this nation and its true residents.

“I’m untrained and uneducated,” Sarah said to herself in mounting excitement. She bounded from her chair. “Where’s my paz?”

“Why?” asked Kate, frowning after her.

“If the papers are all scaring people like that, maybe Cottonwood’s still hiring.”

“Oh for—It’s in the charger, but seriously, kiddo, don’t bother.”

The charger had fallen off the windowsill at some point, no doubt a victim of Fagin and his ongoing feud with the neighbor’s fluffy orange cat, who liked to sit right outside and mock indoor dogs. Sarah found her paz—actually her PAS, her personal application system, but who spelled things out anymore?—under the sagging sofa and wiped the dog hair off on her shirt. She gave it her thumbprint, brought up the Webcrawler, flipped it over into a keypad and quickly found Cottonwood on the International Bureau of Immigration’s home site.

“You’re making a huge mistake,” Kate sighed, bringing her a fresh cup of coffee. Discouragement and love, what else were big sisters for?

“Support me,” said Sarah, jiggling her foot impatiently as she waited for the site’s security program to finish talking to her paz. It was a dinosaur by the day’s standards, only the third she’d ever had. Yes, it had a flatscreen instead of the floating 3D model and yes, the stylus was wrapped in electrician’s tape for a reason, but it still did all the essential things. It was her phone, computer, GPS device, media center and entertainment, not to mention her official identification. It did all her banking, logged all her webcrawling, and represented her in every legal and social setting. To no small degree, her paz was Sarah Fowler and she was happy with it. She wasn’t a Luddite, no matter what Kate said; she just didn’t see the point of replacing something that wasn’t broken just because something else was newer.

“I’ll always support you,” Kate said, watching her in a long-suffering way. “We’re family, aren’t we? You’re all I’ve got.”

True and true. Because, eight years ago, as Sarah and Katelyn Fowler painted their small hometown a tasteful shade of pink to celebrate Big Sister’s 21, their parents had engaged in a little celebration of their own: red wine and candlelight and faux-satin sheets for soon-to-be empty nesters. The wine got flowing. The candles somehow caught the table on fire. The satiny sheets, Sarah later heard a fireman remark, had melted to the bodies on the bed. “Looked like a cocoon,” he’d said. To this day, the smell of smoke—even the happy outdoor barbeque kind—made Sarah’s stomach tighten, made her taste those birthday coladas sticking in her throat, made her think of cocoons sitting in ash.

She and Kate stuck together a few years after that, but those were hard years. There wasn’t any money—their father had, for perhaps the first time in his entire adult life, somehow allowed the insurance payments to lapse. There were two mortgages outstanding on the charred house, and the banks had raked both surviving Fowlers over the figurative coals while the literal ones were still smoldering in the kind of courtroom battle where even winning meant losing—and the financial struggle only stressed an already emotional situation to the breaking point. Kate found a boyfriend and invited him to move in and Sarah, feeling small and frozen out, got herself a job and moved out.

Five years of tense sisterhood followed. The boyfriends never seemed to last, but then, neither did Sarah’s jobs. She tried. She worked anywhere she could, doing all the menial and low-paying scut that fell her way, but nothing stayed. Her “pretty good” apartment across town became a “low-renter” became “ghetto” became gone, and then she was back on Kate’s doorstep in tears with a twelve year-old labradoodle and six cardboard boxes holding all her material things.

And, “We’re family,” said Kate. “You’re all I have. Of course you can come home.”

Home. This one-bedroom fixer with the fold-out couch and Sarah’s stuff still in plastic tubs stacked in the corner of the living room. This leaking-roofed nightmare in a neighborhood two blocks from the train tracks on one side and two blocks from the drive-thru liquor store on the other. Home, where you could put a marble on the floor in the kitchen and watch it roll all the way across the living room into the bathroom. Where the windows wouldn’t open and the doors wouldn’t close. Home.

“Yeah,” Kate would say anytime Sarah got depressed enough to voice this litany out loud. “All of that, sure, but the radio works just fine.”

And this was a joke, because the radio was Sarah. She hummed. Constantly and in all sorts of keys, usually without being aware of it. Show tunes, pop rock, classical instrumentals and TV jingles—anything she’d ever heard somehow got itself squirreled away in her own personal ePlay file and came out whenever her attention wandered.

It wasn’t her fault. As a child, she’d developed a slight stutter and some speech therapist or another had convinced her parents that Sarah’s brain would get around its roadblock if she sang instead of talked. Sarah couldn’t remember if it worked (she seemed to think she’d grown out of it just fine after her second year of school, although the stutter still had a way of popping out when she got very tense), but even if it had, it had only replaced one annoying habit with another. She personally blamed the singing for the loss of at least two of her jobs, and possibly four. Kate said she liked it, but what did that prove? Kate was family.

And things were better now. Not financially, but better where it meant something, better between them. Sarah wanted to be a good sister, or at least less of an ungodly load, and a job would help so much. A good job.

And oh my God, there it was. And it was even better than the article.

“Kate!” Sarah bellowed.

“I don’t care, honey,” Big Sister sang.

“No, you’ve got to hear this! They give you a house!”

“Uh huh.”

“They do! All employees receive on-site lodgings in IBI’s secure facility community, in state-of-the-art homes!”

“That means they’re pre-fabs. In five years, they’ll all be worth a buck and a quarter.”

“I don’t care, it’s free. And the village has its own library and a pool and a shopping district and a community center for fun community events!”

“You are so gullible.”

“I’m doing this,” Sarah breathed, but she wasn’t looking at the virtual tours for the homes. She was staring at the village map, at the shaded area in its center, behind what looked like a very thick wall. Immigrants, it said. No details were illustrated to show how many pools it had, but it was huge.

It had to be huge. Over twenty-five thousand aliens lived there. Gosh.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kate said, breezing through on her way to the bedroom for her purse and her shoes. “You are not going to Cottonwood.”

“I totally am.”

“Oh, come on! Cottonwood is in Kansas, honey! Do you know what Kansas is? It’s Tornado Central.” Kate came back, fastening on a pair of earrings. She worked in the mailroom at the Bugle, where a lady didn’t necessarily have to look good to sort mail, but times were bad and this was their only paycheck at the moment. Plus, Kate never said so, but Sarah was pretty sure she was sleeping with someone over there for a little extra job security. Thoughts like that made her feel bad, but feeling bad didn’t pay bills. “They were hoping a tornado would touch down and blow all the bugs away.”

That pierced even Sarah’s fascination. She frowned at Kate’s back. “That isn’t funny.”

“No, it’s not, but it’s probably true. Don’t do it, I’m serious,” she said suddenly, looking back at her. “I don’t like what I hear about those places. It’s dangerous.”

“How dangerous can it be?” Sarah asked, scrolling through the job listing. “They say no experience necessary. They’ll train you.”

“Sarah, I mean it. Those IBI people—”

“Kate, aliens!” Sarah turned the chair around, leaning forward in fevered excitement. “Come on, aliens! First Contact! Unity! A glorious rainbow connecting humanity and—”

“Giant grasshoppers.”

“I could be part of something big here,” insisted Sarah, undaunted. Her chest felt hot, almost like it did before she started crying, but she wasn’t upset. She was…She was…She was certain! This was it! The perfect job! A house and good money and most of all, best of all, the chance to be where it mattered, to do something in a way that could change the world, two worlds! “I could do something good,” she said, and she would never know just how she looked right then, with the morning sun coming in through the dirty window and her blonde hair glowing like a halo, her eyes fever-bright with innocent joy, and her hands open and unthinkingly outstretched. Kate, four years older and infinitely more cynical, thought she looked like one of those posters that IBI had hung on the railroad cars when the bugs were first brought in off the boats and loaded onto the trains—all gaping grins and frenzied welcome, enough to put a sinking sensation in any alien bug’s stomach, except on Sarah, it was genuine.

“Don’t,” said Kate. “Please.”

“I’m doing this,” Sarah said happily, and began to fill out the online application, her thumbs flying over the key-screen. She was singing to herself as she typed, declaring to any and all listeners that she would like the buy the world a Coke.

Kate lingered, her expression dark and uncertain. Several times, she seemed about to speak, but never did. She shifted from foot to foot instead, late for work and getting later, just watching until Sarah, with a flourish, thumbed the Send button.

The paz counted out sixty-eight long seconds, sending, and chirped.

“They’ll never call you back,” said Kate.

But they did.

CHAPTER TWO

It was amazing how many simple-minded sons of bitches there were for sale in the world. Damek van Meyer thought this quite often and the thought always made him happy in a way that nothing—not money, not works of art, not the sight of powerful men in defeat or beautiful women in naked decadence—ever could. The world was filled with ignorant and avaricious men, and if a man had the means to purchase them, that man could easily rule the world. How tragic it was that only now, in what the natives of this country liked to call ‘the golden years’ of his life did van Meyer acquire the means.

He had spent his youth in petty pursuits, as all youth do. His were more to do with carrying guns across invisible borders and putting drugs into softened hands, but petty things were all they were. Even his ambitions were not so much higher. He had been born into slums, where his most fevered wishes had been no greater than to rule the filthy streets of his spawning. Achieving that, he wished to be warlord over his own army and end the reigns of those who kept him small now. And so it went, like ripples expanding outward in still waters, never setting his goals further than what he could already see within his reach, never imagining…but that, ha, was before the bugs.

Look at him now. And look at them, those bleating sheep, those soft-bellied fools. Through the one-way glass of this small antechamber, van Meyer watched the auditorium of Cottonwood’s convention center fill with people. Good Americans, every one, handpicked for their lack of training, their lack of skill, lack of resources and lack of purpose. If he were not so pressed to acquire social workers, he would give them all guns.

“Mr. van Meyer? It’s ten o’clock.”

“Danke, Piotr. We’ll give five minutes more, ja? To settle. What could be more American than to be fashionably late?”

Piotr laughed dutifully, but van Meyer knew he was being humored. That his ass, to coin the phrase, was kissed. He did not mind. To have his ass kissed by Piotr Lantz was as soothing as warm towels for the hand on a cold and rainy night. He had been a young man when he first found Piotr scavenging in the streets he had made himself master over—a hungry child, slitting throats of beggars for a handful of coins. For the cost of a hot meal and a gun, he had won the boy to his service for all these years. He was not an intelligent man, his Piotr, but a hyena upon two legs, possessed of animal cunning and cruel humor, a squat and somehow crooked sort of creature now past his prime, but still deadly. With a thousand Piotrs at his side, he would not even need the bug.

“What do you think of them?” van Meyer asked, jutting his chin at the glass.

Piotr came to see, his reflection ghostly in the mirror. “Soft bunch. Tofu-eaters.”

“Ja.”

“And that one.” Piotr’s stubby finger smudged the glass. “Little Pollyanna in the first row. She came in singing.”

Van Meyer laughed. Little Pollyanna, yes. He’d noticed her. Younger than most at twenty-four, but old enough that humming happy tunes in public caught stares. Pretty, if thin-faced to his eye. Fair-haired, blue-eyed. The picture of hope in its fullest flower. A cursory ISP-scan revealed no subversive websites, no internet habits at all, beyond an abandoned avatar page, a handful of foolish comics and video viewing ports, and a subscription to something called a Brookings Bugle. Her history was that of low-paying menial jobs and prolonged unemployment leading inexorably deeper into poor credit, desperate financial circumstances. Perhaps slightly above average intelligence on testing, despite mediocre performance in school and no higher learning. Clean body, clean genes. A blank slate.

And she was singing. Van Meyer could just make out the strain of it through the glass if the other noises died just so. He could even name the tune: Over the Rainbow, wordlessly hummed, over and over. She smiled as she sang, looking brightly out the window at the white face of the containment wall. Little Pollyanna.

“Ah, but we wouldn’t mind a slice, nee?” he joked, still not looking at his companion. “A little sweety to clear the palate, as it were?”

Piotr grunted agreement, but without much interest. Women were, to Piotr, as gloves. He fit them over his hand and used them, then forgot. Van Meyer could recall a night when his dangerous young hyena had gone with him to a brothel he knew, found it closed, and gone instead to the music shop next door, where he had killed the cashier and fucked all three patrons—ages eighteen, forty, and sixty-three—before shooting them as well. He did not kill every woman he took to his brutish bed, but when war and lust are one’s only entertainments, it stands to reason one kills many. Van Meyer tried to keep him well-stocked and away from the sheep.

“Ah, I suppose it is time,” he said with a smile. Past time. The sheep were seated now, shifting, restless. “Let us go, my friend, and do good work.”

Piotr laughed again, dutiful Piotr. The IBI logo, We Do Good Work, had been van Meyer’s idea.

He smiled at Pollyanna as he passed her table and she smiled back, naturally. Women felt safe smiling at him. He had a grandfather’s smile now, a grandfather’s walk. A tall man, still a striking man, he dressed well, carried well, spoke well, albeit with an accent he had cultivated to a polish and not to extinction. Dutch blood, tempered by many generations in African sheets, gave him good temper and well-aged good looks. He wore spectacles now when he read. He carried a handkerchief and offered it now and then, gallantly. He did not carry the guns he sold. He carried the men who fired them.

“Good morning,” he said to the room filled with his newest acquisitions. “I am Damek van Meyer, chief executive of International Bureau of Immigration. This is my associate and head of IBI security, Mr. Piotr Lantz.”

A smattering of hellos, some of them appropriately awed at having such an esteemed personage engaged in such a menial duty as this orientation seminar, but most oblivious to the honor. This was America, land of the celebrity.

“You are to be congratulated, for you have all been selected to embark upon a grand new journey in the history of our planet Earth.” Statements of this sort never failed to earn respect in the eyes of sheep, even today. Pollyanna’s pretty smile broadened as she looked up at him, all attention and innocent eyes. “If you have been following the news, then you know that there have been several human interests groups in your capitol and indeed, very close to these offices, who make demands on behalf of the residents of Cottonwood. Naturally, we wish to satisfy them. Naturally indeed, it has always been our goal to provide our guests with a human liaison, to better facilitate integration.”

Pollyanna smiled, beautiful as an angel.

“Alas, our gears grind slowly, nee? Slowly, but exceedingly fine. And you are here. As of this day, this moment, you are become IBI employee, and representative of entire human race.”

Pollyanna hummed under her breath, three notes, and was silent, blushing prettily.

“Today’s seminar is meant to introduce you to your duties and to your clients. Please pay close attention to this briefing and feel free to use paz or Digitel to make notes. If you do not have one—” And here he paused to let the Americans laugh. In this country, such devices were issued along with their social security numbers; it was no more possible to go along without one as the other. In this country, they did not protest RealID or Locatech, but insisted on it, just so long as they could also stream live video and store one million of their favorites songs. He had camps all over the world, even in his own home country, but he had to admit he loved this one best. The sheep were of the very finest stock. “—please to speak with Supply Aid department after the seminar to acquire. We want our workers to feel informed, nee? Connected. And to ask whatever question they should have.”

The sheep took a noisy moment to ready their technologies. Van Meyer waited. Piotr walked to the wall and leaned there, watching over the flock with a bored and ravening eye.

“And now,” said van Meyer, when all were focused once more on him. “We are all quite old enough, I see, to remember the day of First Contact? Or no?” He looked at Pollyanna.

She blushed. “I do remember, actually. I think…I think I may have seen the ship.”

“Oh? To tell us, please?”

“Well…it was a camping trip with my father. I’d gone to bed, but I woke up and left the tent for a drink. There was a noise, like thunder, only very deep, like something you felt in your bones and not your ears. I looked up and thought I saw the whole sky on fire, this huge sheet of fire, the whole thing all at once. It sort of…rolled by overhead and then it was gone.” She laughed nervously, the center of appreciative attention and uncomfortable to be there. “And I went back to bed. My dad slept through the whole thing, so of course he told me I dreamed it all. It was two days before we went home and heard the news.”

“And where was this?”

“Dunes National Park, east of Sacramento.”

“Oh ja? Then very likely you saw them. Lucky girl. Piotr, if you please.”

Piotr switched low the lights, brought down the video screen, and the ship appeared. He always began with a shot of the ship, the whole ship, for no matter how many times the sheep had seen it, it still impressed. It was so big, a great wedge-shaped thing, black against the morning sky, silent, ominous, alien.

“It came into our atmosphere at great speed, as you know, and made nearly two complete circuits of the Earth before coming to its eventual stop two hundred twelve miles due west of Salinas, California. In international waters. Naturally, the world trembled to see what manner of traveler might emerge. The ship did not move. So many days, it wait…” He waited out a well-rehearsed pause, then added, “And wait…”

Laughter, as always, to break the tension. Most everyone knew the story, of course, but it was always different to hear it when looking at the ship, frozen in this timeless video, as fresh and as terrible as it had been the day of its arrival. Pollyanna merely flickered a smile. Her gaze remained rapt upon the screen.

“The Cabinet of First Contact was commissioned and made many attempts to communicate and then to enter, but the ship remain silent, closed. At last, come the USS Enterprise.” He paused again to let the appreciate chuckles and whispers run their course. “It brought scientist and linguist and ambassador and all manner of important men and women to make semi-permanent settlement until the mystery of the ship could be solved, but when the great carrier arrive, the ship open. It does not land, does not move. The bug do not emerge. But the ship open and when Mr. Kurtz and his team go up to meet them, they are met without resistance. They enter the ship—” He spread his hands to indicate the insufficiency of words. “—and look in awe upon the faces of beings from another world.”

Soft humming at his elbow, swiftly stifled. Pollyanna blushed and stared at the screen.

“Now I will not bore you all with a faithful recounting of the following days. I am certain you have to study these things once in school already, nee? And they are all on file at the IBI museum for those who are interested in such things.” He watched little Pollyanna make a note on her ancient PAS. “I will say only that First Contact did not bring aids to end world hunger or cure disease, only the great responsibility—and great cost—of housing nearly half a million refugees. And so was born the International Bureau of Immigration. We—for you are part of that family now—are a community of many nations, representing no country but only humanity, and seeking to better the lives of those unfortunate strangers who have been stranded here by circumstance.

“For they are stranded. By whom, no one can say; the bug himself seem unable to grasp just how or why they have come. It is believed by our top researchers that the bug are, quite sadly, of a hive-like mentality, where unknown queen or similar intelligence has been demised in their disastrous landing. The remainder are notably weak of will, of mind, of imagination. But it must be admitted we judge them perhaps by human standards, which is a presumption. You will make up your own minds, I hope, but you will always remember as you do so that you are IBI and you will show a professional attitude and professional kindness towards your clients always.”

A hand raised near the back of the room.

“Sir? What, uh, what do we call them? I mean, all I’ve heard is…uh…”

Sheep shifted, eyeing one another.

Van Meyer smiled and said it for them. “Bug.”

“Well…yes.”

“Bug. Roach. Jim Cricket, ja. But bug particularly. Bug will do.” He caught Pollyanna’s frown and addressed her kindly, as a grandfather. “In twenty years, we have never been able to make them understand what we mean when we ask for the name of their people. Their minds are not like ours. And yet, we must call them something, nee? After twenty years, it cannot continue ‘The Visitors,’ eh? ‘The Travelers?’ ‘The Aliens?’”

“I guess not,” she said. “But bug is…is kind of derogatory, isn’t it?”

“To a degree, from one who use it so, but to look another way, do they not resemble a bug? Eh? Let us examine.”

A nod to Piotr and the video switched. There stood, as large as to life, one of them.

It was the closest look any sheep had ever received. No camera was allowed inside the immigration camps, no news-craft allowed to fly over or even near the walls. In days not too long distant, it would have been impossible to keep such secrets, but in these enlightened times, with the anonymity of the internet extinct and agents of even a free press easily detained for treason, IBI’s control over those images available to the public remained absolute. Some illicit photos and videos cropped up now and then, but they were grainy, amateur things that merely tantalized the eye. This one pierced it.

“The adult bug stand 2.3 meters, with a fifteen percent variation to healthy individual height or weight, same as human, nee? As you see, body is distinctly arthropod overall, but biped, with many man-like characteristic. Coloring of shell typically appear dull, with green, grey, black or brown base and brighter color overlaid. Certain individuals will have much brighter pigmentation of yellow, red, or blue, and this is not sexual display, as all bug appear to be one gender, which we shall shortly address.

“The eyes are, as you see, binocular, wide-set by our standards, and quite large, but are not insect-like or faceted in any way. I have heard them often compared to human eyes, and indeed, our research suggest their vision is very much like ours. You will notice large and small pair of antennae on top of the head, which is somewhat flat and oblong, as that of mantis. These appear to be used as part of language of the bug and not as sensory organ of any kind. If I magnify—” Piotr did so. “—you can determine several short filaments along the head, which relate in some fashion to the bug’s balance and other senses, particularly to hearing, as they are arranged around the plate which correspond to the bug’s ear. We call them hairs, but they are not truly. The bug is entirely hairless. You will see no nose—”

“How do they smell?” someone whispered, and at least six answered, “Terrible.” There was much laughter. Pollyanna frowned again.

“The mouth is formed by this network of finger-like appendages which hang in front of the throat and assist both in speech and the breaking up of food. Bug language is quite well-developed and their ear for speech quite good. All understand English excellently, and most understand several languages beside, although of course they do not speak it, as they can produce little beyond the sorts of click, chirp, and buzzing sound one would expect of giant insect. Yet they have a language of word as well as sound. Most of our employees find that after immersion, they do not even need the translators. But you will require one to begin.”

Piotr took his cue and heaved himself up to pass them out, each ear-mounted little curlicue in its own baggie with a serial number to be filed with the sheep’s papers.

“They’re quite comfortable,” van Meyer said encouragingly. “Resists water and pressure. Battery life of ten years. You can shower with them, sleep with them, and it is highly recommended that you do not take off at any time while on premises. There have been misunderstandings in the past, regrettable and perhaps avoidable. Please. It is not always possible to comprehend the motives of the bug, but one can at least comprehend his words.”

Pollyanna put hers on, right there in the auditorium. Precious child.

“I will warn you that in effort to as fully enhance the translator’s usefulness, we have integrated many rather offensive words and phrases. I apologize to our members of delicate ear, but we at IBI are interested in accuracy foremost. It is not our place to impose moral standard upon the speech of the bug, which, like many of low intelligence and imagination, tend to be vulgar. And now we move on.”

A gesture, and Piotr returned to the video equipment and pulled the bug’s head out to a full-body shot once more.

“Observe please. The bug has no bone, but exoskeleton of hard and extremely durable plates of a chitinoid structure, similar in composition to that of crab or insect, but much stronger. Although the plates overlap in most areas, there can be found several joints or seams along the body, where are pliant spans of sensory skin. Although you might imagine this make the bug stiff and immobile, they are surprisingly agile and much, much faster and stronger than a human being.”

The next several minutes showed a variety of bugs in motion—leaping over vans, running over rooftops, throwing things, snatching things, slapping things…

“I must warn you, the following images become quite graphic,” van Meyer murmured, and immediately afterward, the bug scuffling with soldiers on the deck of the Enterprise seized a human head and twisted it right off the man’s shoulders.

Gasps and squeaks from the audience. Pollyanna’s mouth dropped open.

After that, the images came more rapidly, assaulting the eyes with unblinking, uncensored violence. A bug, seizing the human arm that has just shoved him and kicking once, still holding that arm with a belligerent stare while the viewing eye tries to reconcile there being no man attached anymore, no man anywhere in frame, just a spray of blood. Screen-shift to a bug grabbing the door of an armored IBI van and ripping it away in a squeal of metal. Screen-shift to a bug leaping up and kicking at what appears to be a metal wall, just one kick to dent it, three kicks to break through. Screen-shift to a bug snatching up a soldier and swinging him overhead like a sack of flour, swinging and slamming him down so that he split, yes, exactly like a sack of flour, red flour in a red cloud that settles as the bug straightens and wipes a hand over its clicking, alien face.

Lastly, van Meyer’s personal favorite, a bug listening attentively to a screaming soldier’s tirade, accepting pushing, accepting blows from the butt of a gun, and then reaching up, quite calmly, casually, to take the soldier by his flak jacket just as one takes the lapels of a dinner coat, take and rip it entirely open, then kicking a neat round hole through which exiting portal one can clearly see, on slow frame, first the man’s somewhat mangled heart ejecting and then the bug’s clenched foot.

“Dear God,” someone said. Not Pollyanna.

“We have much fewer of these misunderstandings since we develop the translator,” van Meyer demurred, and there followed a mad plastic rush as the sheep put them on.

The image on the screen returned to that of the bug simply standing, staring into the camera with eyes that were so much like that of humans…and which were not entirely defeated, no matter how quiet or still he stood. Van Meyer gave his new sheep some time to look with new eyes on this docile monster and then went on.

“You will notice the arms and legs also being quite long and slender. And strong, as we’ve seen, far out of proportion to their size. Please note the sharp, thorn-like protrusions along the bug’s forearms and thighs, along the hip and side of chest, and especially those along the underside of forearm and elbow-joint. These are not poisonous, as I have heard many rumors, but are very sharp, so be careful when engaging bug to remain facing them, for as I’ve said, they have no sensory perception in their shell and can swiftly cause very bad cuts brushing sidelong against you.”

“Now what are those?” someone asked. “The twitchy things on its stomach? Are those…more arms, or…?”

“You refer to small, jointed appendages here along the lower region of the body? These we call plumapods, which they tell me mean ‘feathered foot’, but these are neither feet nor feathers. Some also call them claspers, as they resemble that appendage somewhat, although their function is very different. True insect clasper is used in reproduction. These, we surmise are involved somehow to bug’s sense of smell. You see when he extend them fully, there are brushes along the tip which contain very powerful chemical receptors. Very delicate, you see how he keep them snug up, just so, against his shell where it fit into small concavity evolved for this protective purpose. Although we do not understand precisely why, we do know that removal of these appendages has caused death in many of the bug.”

Pollyanna looked up.

“But please, we are getting ahead of ourselves.” Van Meyer brought out a pen-light to pinpoint specific areas on the viewing screen. “The body of the bug can be compared to that of many Earth insects, most notably the ant, at least in outward appearance. It has three main regions: the thorax, or chest; the abdomen; and the metasomal node. Now the thorax, the chest, is comparable to human ribcage in size, but waist tapers to exceedingly narrow, here, at what science calls the petiole, and this is because the bugs possess very few actual organs. Rather, they have very complex blood and very large heart whose many chambers do the work also of stomach and lung to metabolize oxygen, food, and all his needs. He requires only a very few extraneous glands in addition, and of course, the bladder and sexual apparatus, contained here, in the lower abdomen.”

“I thought they were drones,” someone said.

“Nee, they are unisexual, having one gender, which would appear to be the male gender, so indicated by certain sexual organ which the bug carry internally.”

Piotr, in the corner, reached down with a toothy grin and gripped his crotch. Some sheep tittered. Van Meyer did not approve.

“And so, as our language does not admit unisexual personal pronoun readily, for sake of simplicity, we call the bug ‘he’. But although the bugs do not mate in a sexual fashion, they can and do reproduce. Sadly. Now, the metasomal node contains mainly the posterior chamber of the heart and certain glands which circulate digestive juices and nutriment back up into the abdominal region for expulsion. The legs attach at the post-petiole segment, between the abdomen and metasomal node, which is itself entirely inflexible. Please again note the thorn-like protrusions here and here and remember that these are not venomous, but can inflict considerable damage.”

Pollyanna raised her hand. “Sadly?”

“My dear, the population control of the bug has been our greatest challenge from the beginning. Proceeding, the leg is the leg of a large, powerful insect, as that of a cricket or a—”

“Why?”

“Excuse?”

“Why are you controlling their population growth? I mean—” She blushed again, not so prettily. “If they live here now, shouldn’t they be free to—”

“Hell, no,” someone else said, and there were sheepish bleats of agreement. “I’m sorry, lady, I’m all for peace and love and all that, but I want Earth for humans. I don’t want a bunch of bugs breeding my grandkids off the planet.”

Pollyanna seemed surprised. “But…They live here now. If someone came to your house and told you—”

“Hey, lady, they came to my house. I get to tell them not to boink under the fridge.”

More laughter. Pollyanna looked startled by it at first, and then disturbed.

“What we have done for the moment is a kind of compromise, nee? We attempt foremost to educate bug upon restraint, but the bug, sadly, merely hides his offspring and continue to propagate. Therefore, we control the population growth with special squads whose job it is to locate egg farms and destroy them.”

“Destroy?” Pollyanna recoiled.

“Only the eggs, which are no more alive than the egg you have for breakfast, ja?”

“Never eating that again,” someone muttered.

“When the egg hatches into little bug, of course we do not destroy. To the contrary, safety of young bug is of great concern to us, because adult bug…well, it is perhaps presumption to say inattentive parent, but clearly, bug is more interested in producing child than rearing. Who knows what is situation on home planet, what high infant mortality there must be to help keep explosive procreation in check? Some bug develop almost mania, making many, many eggs. If allowed to breed unsupervised, bug would soon swarm over all Earth. Even so, despite our best effort, bug population has risen with disturbing speed. If we do not control this, it is possible they outnumber our great-great grandchildren, nee?”

The sheep were outraged, all but Pollyanna, who still appeared puzzled.

“Nee, it is not our wish to stamp out bug as so many cockroach,” van Meyer said gently, looking directly at her. “Only to make him think about the consequence of thoughtless reproduction. And safety of the young bug is of paramount concern also, which is why your duties to report child endangerment are so boldly outlined. Nee, nee,” he concluded, soothingly, smiling. “This is not police state and we are not Evil Uncle. We are IBI.”

Polly returned his grandfatherly smile tremulously.

“We do good work.”

* * *

“You should have heard it, Kate. It was subtle, but it wasn’t my imagination. The guy spent five hours essentially telling us that the aliens are retarded.”

“Oh come on.”

“Not in so many words, but—hang on.” Sarah moved the paz to her other hand so that she could lay her right arm over Fagin’s back, since he was being insistent about it. The long drive and the unfamiliar house had made him emotionally needy, and so naturally, as soon as he had the arm, he took the lap too, wedging his massive bulk over both thighs and instantly putting everything from her hips down into pins-and-needles land. “But he just really drilled it in,” she continued, resigned. “Over and over, really soft and gentle. ‘They’re not smart, they don’t take care of themselves, they need to be controlled.’”

Kate’s tiny image on the screen flickered as she shifted her own paz and had trouble restabilizing. The two weren’t exactly compatible anymore. She really needed to get a new one. “So? Maybe they do.”

“And maybe they don’t. Kate!” she said, trying to laugh through her frustration. “These people came to us in a spaceship! A planet full of stupid layabouts does not master intergalactic space travel!”

Kate’s image flickered again and snapped to black. She didn’t need it. She could hear the distraction in Kate’s voice, and the tight I’m-pretending-I’m-not-angry tone that had been her default setting pretty much since Sarah told her she was really moving to Cottonwood. “Okay, so the guy who’s been studying them for twenty years is wrong and Sarah Fowler, who hasn’t even met one yet, is right. Congratulations. You’re that good.”

Sarah felt herself blush. “It didn’t sound right, that’s all I’m saying. Some of the little things he said just…just really got to me.”

“Like what?” Kate asked, sounding concerned now and not big-sister patronizing.

“Like…Like he said that if their claspers came off, they’d die.”

A short pause. “What are claspers?”

“Oh, that’s not the point, they’re like tiny little extra arms that smell things. The point is, how many aliens had to lose their claspers and die without having any other…What’s the word I want? Variables?”

Kate was quiet for a while. The picture tried to come back a few times, showing Sarah glimpses of her sister through a haze of multi-colored distortion. “These guys are professionals, Sarah. It’s their job to make connections that people like us miss.”

“Yeah, but how did so many aliens lose their claspers in the first place, that’s what I really want to—”

“Did your house come with a phone?”

“Huh? Um, yeah.” She twisted to look up at it, clinging to the wall like a shiny, black beetle. “But it’s patched into the IBI switchboard. I can’t figure out how to get a line outside the village. I could look it up in the manual, but—” She laughed. “—I’m kind of manualed-out. I had to set everything, you have no idea. All the faucets are TruTouch. Who the heck even knows off-hand how many degrees they like their shower? Or their drinking water? Plus, I got my Fahrenheit and my Celsius screwed up and practically steamed-cooked my face off the first time I…Why?” She checked the paz’s signal, but it looked good. “Can’t you hear me okay?”

“I hear you. I was just curious. So this is your own paz?”

“Yeah,” said Sarah, still trying to see where this was going. “But they scanned it in through the company server when I got here. You know. So I can’t take pictures or blog about company policy or stuff. They said it wouldn’t affect my performance. I mean, I can barely see you, but—”

“That’s normal for the fossil you’re using,” Kate agreed. In a new, hearty voice, she added, “TruTouch faucets, those are awesome!”

“They gave me all sorts of things, it’s hilarious. There’s a plasmapanel TV in the living room, and all the appliances, even a coffee machine.”

“Another TruTouch?”

“No, it’s one of the Konaluv models and it’s crazy, I don’t know what half of those settings even mean. I tried to make a simple cup of coffee when I got home. I think I programmed it to spit out sixteen double-caff cappuccinos at midnight on the first day of 2045. Happy New Year.”

Kate laughed.

“I keep trying to fix it and it keeps adding more coffees to the order and blinking its timer at me. I’m scared of it. And oh, dig this! I’m driving through Wyoming and I see this garage sale, so I stop and buy this ultra-cheap bed because it comes with the mattresses for free, and I spend, like, an hour, trying to wedge it into the van—”

“I think I know where this is headed,” Kate said. She sounded as if she might be smiling.

“The house comes with a bed! A huge bed! One of those memory-gel beds with a heating and cooling feature, can you believe it?”

“What’d you do with the other one?”

“I put it in my spare room so you have a skanky place to sleep when you come to visit. But I tell you, it’s weird what they gave me and what they didn’t. TV, but no sofa. Bed, but no sheets. There’s no dining room table or anything like that, but there’s a centerpiece with plastic fruit sitting smack in the middle of the floor. Fagin ate the orange already.”

“Oh yeah?”

“And barfed it up on the bed. Thank God memory-gel washes off easy. And did I tell you about the tests yet?”

“What tests?”

“They tested us before they even let us go to the first seminar, and not just the standard drug-and-disability tests, but weird ones.”

“Like what?”

“Like…I don’t know. They asked all these questions, like, did I like school and would I rather watch the news or read about it? How do I answer that?”

“How did you answer that?” Kate asked quietly.

“I said I pretty much just read the comics. And then she asked me if I was usually happy and if I thought I was normal or important. I’m going to be an alien’s social worker; what’s normal? I don’t know,” Sarah sighed, rubbing Fagin’s neck. “It just felt weird. And they took blood and saliva swabs for a gene-test, too. Who does that?”

“Lots of places,” Kate said, but she sounded uneasy. “It just means they’re looking for long-term employees, that’s all. So you must have passed, that’s reassuring…when do you start work?”

“Monday, officially, but there’s another seminar tomorrow that I have to go to, and tours all weekend long for people who want to take one. I don’t know, I may skip out on that. I’ve got a map and anyway, I’d rather go to town, find some Chinese food, maybe get some sheets. I want a good night’s sleep before I meet my first alien.”

“Good plan.”

The paz finally succeeded in loading up a decent picture of Kate, but it didn’t show much. They watched each other breathe for a while as Sarah wondered how to bring them out of it without hanging up. The move and the job had been such a sore point between them, and they were trying hard not to keep pushing at it now that it was over and done, but not talking about it just seemed to make it swell up bigger. She wanted assurances now, not ‘I told you so’. She needed her family and Kate was all she had.

“IBI does lots of good things,” she said finally.

“Yeah?” Kate uttered a short laugh. “Besides paying for your training, giving you a house, and, oh, taking care of all the roaches so the rest of the planet doesn’t have to?”

“Yeah, besides that,” Sarah said, frowning. “They also have this great recycling program. I read about it in my manual.”

“Ooo, recycling. What stimulating reading.”

“Hey, it saves this camp’s community eighteen million dollars every year, apparently, plus it helps teach the aliens our basic work ethic.”

“Work ethic?” Kate frowned.

“No, it’s all voluntary. Anyone who wants to can join up and they get paid, even.”

“That’s nice,” Kate said dimly.

“Well, it’s a start. Think about it, as kids, we start doing chores for nickels, and then get paper routes, and work fast food in our teens, so by the time we’re ready to enter society, we have a unified work ethic, but—”

“My God, are you reading this to me?”

“No,” said Sarah defensively. “It was a really good chapter in the manual. I was interested.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a step, that’s why! Maybe once they understand the work ethic and get a good feel of our economy, they can, I don’t know, go out and get jobs. They can live with us—”

“Not a chance.”

“—just like it should be,” Sarah said stubbornly. “Integrated.”

“I can already hear people screaming about aliens taking their jobs.”

“Well, why not? They live here now, they’re going to need jobs.”

“Honey…”

More silence. This time, Kate broke it first.

“Honey, I really think you need to focus right now on just doing the job they give you and not trying to change the world and buy it a Coke. You…You are one person. And IBI is a big corporation who…who knows what they’re doing.”

“I know,” said Sarah, stung. Something in her tone woke Fagin. He licked her cheek, concerned, then heaved himself up and went out to investigate the yard. His departure left her alone on the floor, alone in the house…alone in Kansas.

Silence, silence. They breathed.

“Maybe you should just come home,” Kate said quietly. “Please, Sarah. I’d feel better.”

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can. Put everything back in the van, grab Fagin, leave the possessed coffee machine…if you need money, I’ll wire you some, just—”

“Seriously, I can’t, Kate. I’m on contract.”

“You what?”

“IBI’s employment contract. They explained it like…like a studio contract for an actor? I can’t go get it because it’s filed at the office, but the thing is, they hold my employment rights for one year, with an option to renew for ten years, up to five times.” She laughed, a little nervously. “If they like me.”

Kate’s picture wavered wildly. She was shaking it or smacking it, trying to make her own picture come in clearer. When it settled, she was closer, all eyes and a pinched wrinkle between them. “You can’t quit?”

“I can, but it’s breach of contract and they can sue me. Also, no one else will be able to hire me, whether I’m working for them or not, until my contract expires.”

“Jesus.”

“They can also…” She hesitated, then plunged ahead. This part had bothered her all day. “They can also redirect me within the company without my consent. Like…they can move me to any other camp, or to any other department where they need people…even security, it said.”

Only it hadn’t said ‘security’ in the fine print. It said ‘military applications’.

“But that’s not right, is it?” Sarah asked, rubbing at her tingling, dog-free legs anxiously. “I mean…they can’t really make me carry a gun, can they?”

Silence.

“Kate?”

“I think you’re being silly,” Kate said, crisply and with finality. “That clause is only in there to apply to all the ex-cops and army reservists who join up. IBI is a…like the PeaceCorps, for Christ’s sake. Sure, they have to have people with guns, because the bugs are dangerous, but arming a bunch of untrained yokels is even more dangerous. Look, I have to go. You go have a fun weekend, eat your Chinese food, and just don’t be such a goose, okay?”

“Okay,” Sarah said in a little voice.

“It’s a good job. You’ll do well, make lots of money…and when the year’s up, you can come home and we’ll…we’ll figure out where to go next, okay? But stop freaking out about little things. You do your job and let the big boys do theirs, okay?”

“I—”

“I love you, Sarah,” Kate said, almost vehemently. “Get a new paz.” And hung up without waiting for an answer.

Sarah switched her paz off and sat in the dark. After a while, Fagin came back in and lay down beside her. She rested her hand on his shaggy back and stared into space, listening to the echoes of their dual breath in the empty room.

CHAPTER THREE

It was dark when they came in from the Heaps, and the first thing Sanford saw when he turned onto the litter-strewn road leading to his house was his door standing open.

Robbed. Again. Living this close to the wall, the risk of home invasion was far less than it might be in the unpatrolled middlegrounds of the prison, but it still happened and he had more to lose than most. He swore, waking his son, who had dozed off against his shoulder. T’aki looked around, at once tense and alert. Sanford clicked reassuringly, told him it was nothing and tried to mean it, but the words were bitter in his throat and his son’s anxiety did not lessen.

“What happened?” he asked, his tiny hands slipping between the plates armoring Sanford’s neck, seeking comfort by touching skin, wanting to be touched in return. “Why is the door broken? Did the vans come?”

“Kids,” a voice clicked.

Sanford didn’t look around. He knew it was Sam—Samaritan. Yls’a’thq really, but the human names got in, didn’t they? Like sand under chitin, digging and eroding and bleeding you out. Sam was one of those he’d had a very vague recollection of back on the ship, and that connection made them closer than any of Sanford’s other neighbors in Cottonwood, even though Sam was an irritating handful of sand himself. Sanford didn’t like him or trust him, but they spent at least two nights a ten-span together anyway, sitting on Sam’s rusted-out vehicle and drinking, because without companions of any kind, why bother surviving at all?

“They came in just after you left,” Sam continued now. He didn’t get up. He’d lit a fire in the empty place where the vehicle’s engines used to be and was cooking a thick strip of meat. Sam ate real meat almost every night, but that didn’t make him careless of it. Surely there were eyes all around them even now, waiting for Sam’s attention to wander just long enough for a leap and a grab. “Carried off about ten cans between them.”

Sanford swore again and put his son down. Thirteen cans had been all the food he’d had stockpiled in what he thought of as ‘the open’, even though he’d hidden them. The chit exchange office would be closed by the time he reached it—they shut their windows an hour after the men at the Heaps shut the gate—so unless he felt like walking all the way back to the merchant-grounds and paying the exorbitant price for the meat sold there, there would be no dinner tonight. Until last ten-span, there had been extra cans of bug food hidden in the secret room, but, ha, he’d been robbed and so he’d brought them up.

Sanford sent his furious stare both ways along the causeway, even knowing the culprits were long gone with their prize, and cursed every pair of watchful eyes he spied as the eyes of thieves and cowards. And bugs.

Still. Kids. Starving children, no doubt. A herd of them, either at the direction of their parent or a psuedo-parent, or a fatherless pack surviving as best they could. Either way, only children, hungry children.

“IBI was here,” Sam said, turning his bit of dinner. “IBI was everywhere, I understand.”

“Contraband search?”

“Never got out of the vans. It was eerie. They drove around all day, slow. Hundreds of them, I keep hearing, and not just here, but everywhere.”

That was bad. Strange behavior for humans meant trouble for yang’ti. Sanford could see his son shifting restlessly beside him, wanting to hurry up and be home, but this news disturbed him. “They weren’t out as far as the Heaps,” he said.

“I don’t explain it, I just report it.” Sam stabbed the meat on the end of a twisted length of metal and pulled it out of the fire, laying it across his thigh to cool. He looked at Sanford, antennae low and palps snapping. “They’ll be back and when they do come, they’ll get out and come on their little pink feet. I have stuff for you to hold.”

Sanford buzzed curtly, looking around. The causeway was never empty, especially when good meat was roasting out in the tempting open. “Not now.”

“I’ll bring it tomorrow,” Sam said.

“It’s too dangerous. I’ll be searched.”

“Your boy’s shell is looking mottled.” Sam picked up the strip of meat and just held it, dripping juices onto the dirt. “Too late now to turn in your chits. You got anything to feed him?”

Sanford buzzed again, less shrilly. He really did not like this man.

“Fresh cow, right off the shoulder. Good enough for humans.” Sam dangled the meat out, inviting a snatch from a tiny hand. “You hungry?”

T’aki hugged onto Sanford’s leg and said nothing. Of course he was hungry.

Sam glanced up, gave the strip a toss, and Sanford caught it out of the air. “I’ll bring the stuff by tomorrow,” he said again, and kicked the lid down over the fire to smother it. He hopped down from the vehicle’s roof and went into his own house, where, for all Sanford knew, he had plenty more strips of meat and crates of contraband for Sanford to risk his life over.

He gave the meat to T’aki.

“I’m not mottled,” the boy said, eating it.

“I know you’re not.”

“Just dusty.”

“I know.”

Crawling on the Heaps all day no doubt made them both look like they were on their last hour before molting…or dying. And yes, it still made Sanford sick to look out over the valley of garbage and see his small son digging merrily through human waste for one scrap of metal casing, one cache of wire, one uncorrupted circuit board, all so he could fit it together and trade it in for the soft, greasy meat the humans made for bugs. His son, who was not starving, perhaps, but who was always hungry. His son, who played in dirt with rusted hunks of metal while Sanford rebuilt the human machines that brought in that unappetizing nourishment. His son, who did not know how wrong this all was.

They went home.

All thirteen cans were gone, of course, and some of his tools, but nothing that couldn’t be replaced. They hadn’t broken anything out of spite and, more importantly, they hadn’t found the trapdoor and ransacked the chamber it hid. They must have been very young; older children knew how to search.

Sanford set down his sack of parts and picked T’aki up. They shared breath briefly, and then he carried the boy outside and over to the aqueduct wall, to the crack where water was always trickling out. He kicked away some broken glass and heavy coils of wire, set the boy down, and helped him out of his clothes.

A naked child outside, bathing in the street. His heart hurt. He caught palmfuls of water and passed them over his son’s head, thinking of the house where he’d been born, of the tall spitting fountain in the bath-house, of splashing up to his chest in warm, clean water and swinging from the spout until his father threatened to bind him up in a sack and wash him in the laundry vat. The tall fountain, with soap and sponge-cloths and a sprayer arm and blue stones pressed all around it and his father afterwards with hot oil to rub into his chitin, all the while swearing that he was dirty already and who could do that, who could come out of a bath dirtier than when he went in?

“Father?”

“Yes?”

“You’re chirring.”

“Was I? It’s been a long day.” Sanford wet his son’s clothes and rinsed them out as best he could. The breeches were thinning over the hips already and he’d found nothing in the Heaps to replace them with. In another year, they would be rags held on with tape, as his own were.

They walked back to the house, stopping at the ditch so that his naked son could piss outside in the garbage and then run on in and get into bed. Not a true bed, just a pile of sheets too torn and stained for human use, but all that the boy had ever known.

“How many moons does our world have?” T’aki asked, pulling it all over his head in happy swaths.

“Three.”

“One of them is blue.”

“Yes.”

“And two are white like this moon!”

“Yes. Go to sleep.” He lifted a fold of the bedding to expose T’aki’s small face and bent close to share breath. “Go to sleep,” he said again, tucking him in.

He should not have had a son, he thought, watching the boy thrash and kick and grumble and finally curl for sleep. For many reasons, and surely the best of them was simply not to bring a new prisoner into this human hell, an innocent and happy life to grow crushed under human boots. He should not have done it, could remember feeling the pangs of shock and bitter fury whenever he saw a child jumping about some stranger’s knees, wanting to run and grab that selfish it’gaz and scream, “Why? Why, when you know it is as good as murder?”

But time erodes one. Time cuts and bleeds. And shuffled for years and years and empty years, from camp to camp with no friend, no family, had become a killing thing. After moving here to Cottonwood, the newest camp with the tallest walls, set down among his suspicious neighbors, it occurred to him that if he had a child, at least he would have someone to live for. His family on yang’Tak had ceased to exist; they offered him no hope, no sense of purpose. Earth’s reality had killed that memory and all he had was here, and it was Hell.

So it was here, in Cottonwood, before the causeways had filled with trash, before the aqueducts had cracked, before the ditch of reeking piss flowed beside his house, that Sanford surrendered to loneliness and decided to have a child.

He took the sheets where his son now slept—old and stained and torn even then—and tied the corners to the roof of his house. He tied it securely, not too tightly. He wanted it to flap when the wind came, but not blow away. And when he was satisfied, he stepped back, opened his urovens, and sprayed it with piss.

“You know there’s a Blue House just twenty rows up.” Sam. The first words Sam ever spoke to him. He’d come up the causeway in the morning heat, drinking ferment from a plastic jug that had once held machine oil. He’d been fighting. His left shoulder-plate was cracked. And he’d looked familiar…not enough that he had even a sense of a name, but enough that he felt he’d ought to. Later he would learn that Sam paid for his fine house and fresh meat by making drugs and ferment, not only for yang’ti, but for humans (and if certain rumors were to be believed, that wasn’t the only thing he did for humans), but at the time, he was just another stranger.

Sanford did not answer him. Bad enough to have to make piss in public (but after so many years, even that shame was dulling), he did not want to talk about it. He moved a few steps over and sprayed again, drenching as much of the fabric as he could. The scent was not strong yet, but it would carry. Healthy male piss, full of pheromones.

“You’re crazy to be doing this.” Sam tipped back the jug and poured half its contents down his throat. “And if anyone answers, she’ll be crazy. So you’re bound to have crazy cross-eyed kids.”

A final spray, just a spurt, the best he could manage. The first patch was beginning to turn blue in the open air, but not very. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. There was supposed to be courting, affection, trust, or at the very least, a sense of play and excitement. He remembered the house on yang’Tak, his father’s father and Y’si’di, his bondmate, who had lived together forty years, had made six children, and still exchanged breath every morning, touched hands every night.

The memory stabbed at him and he opened his urovens and sprayed hard, some of it blue even wet. I want a baby, that blue stain said. I want to breed.

“Crazy,” said Sam, this stranger who watched him piss. Then he clapped him on the back—human gesture, unsettling—and said, “I live six cars down, the big one, raised up. Come by tonight. I have a bucket of cow guts and some beer.”

He didn’t think he would, but when night came, yes, Sanford went. That was how it was here. Things…eroded you.

A bucket of cow guts sounded good tonight. Sanford left T’aki now soundly sleeping and went outside to sit in his doorway and catch whatever breeze there was. It was still a little light, enough to see the dark blocks of the houses they were fortunate enough to have here in the ‘good’ part of the prison. The humans were happy to provide free housing, of course, where yang’ti were forced to share quarters with as many as nineteen other people, without electricity or windows or even room to hang a curtain between nests for privacy. And some chose to go on living there because the two thousand chits a month it cost to rent a private lot was so far out of their grasp it might as well be a home on yang’Tak.

Sanford paid. It was more money than any honest man could come by on Earth, but it had been a long time since Sanford thought of himself as an honest man. He paid for the lot and he’d paid for a house to put on it. The one they delivered to him wasn’t too bad (although it would never even begin to compare with Sam’s), but it wasn’t new. Just a plain metal box with a hole in the roof he’d patched with plastiglass to let in some light, a hole in the wall he’d made into a window with the cracked glass from a television set, a flimsy door he’d rebuilt with fiberglass panels he’d found in the Heaps, and of course, the hole in the floor which he’d covered over with carpet…and improved on. But it was private and it had an electrical hookup. He could live here comfortably for years yet.

And he might.

He thought of T’aki growing into his final molt here in this place, sitting side by side at the work table fixing human media players for cans of greasy meat and bone meal, believing this was the way it was supposed to be. He never should have had a child.

On the fifth night, she came. She darted into his house and shut the door too hard behind her, startling him badly enough that he’d nearly kicked her. They stood, both of them with jangling nerves and snapping antennae, until Sanford cautiously untucked his claspers and brushed her female scent from the air.

“I can’t keep the egg,” she said. Her first words.

“I want it,” he said, and did. He wanted to hatch his child himself, as his father had done for his sons. Silly, sentimental reason, but true.

They undressed. She stayed nervous, jumping at every sound outside. She had good reason. This was riskier for her than for him. They couldn’t go outside now, so he pissed on the wall, just a little, to reassure her that yes, it was him. Her claspers tasted it and she relaxed just enough to crack her urovens and piss in return.

They sniffed. Old enough. Healthy enough.

Good enough, for this place.

“Will you touch me?” she asked, quivering, offering her hands. And he did, grateful. They held each other for a long time, now and then fanning palps for quick breaths and caressing one another with their claspers, but not speaking. They had nothing else to say. He was ready before she was, but he waited.

At last she released him and hunkered down, her legs tight against her body, arms securely braced from knee to floor. He mounted, settling his weight by degrees, soothing her with chirrs and gentle touches along her joints. His claspers opened around her narrow waist, slowly fanning, tasting mainly her anxiety. He waited.

After nearly an hour, her cloacal vens opened. He relaxed his belly flaps at once and inserted his spermatogus. Only halfway. The sphincter that closed off her ovaduct remained tight.

“Do you want to leave?” he asked quietly.

“No, no, I…I can do this. Just…”

He stroked her joints.

Another hour. She opened. He finished penetration. She ejected her catalyst at once, as if in apology for the wait, and he followed, closing his eyes in the paralysis of orgasm. When it faded, he uttered some reassuring chirrs, his claspers patting and stroking along her belly seams. Hers brushed at the base of his spermatogus, where they joined, painting him with her pheromones.

“Again,” she said. “To be sure.”

Yes. More matings meant a larger, healthier egg. She was terrified, but determined, stimulating him with scent-taps until he filled and ejected again.

“One more?” she whispered.

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to be sure.”

He reached his hand down. Hers were locked in place, but she rubbed her palps over his palm. It helped. They twined their claspers together as his spermatogus slowly filled.

She never told him her name, not any name at all.

He climaxed a third time and dismounted. She paced around his work table nervously as her belly swelled. Finally she came to him, her ovipositor fully extended. He knelt down to catch the egg she laid in his hands.

His child.

Her eyes were anguished as she stared at it, milky white and soft in the open air. Then she skreed quietly, picked up her clothes, and turned away to dress. He wanted to ask her then how many times she’d done this, if she’d ever seen the child hatch, if she wanted to know if this one did. In the end, her pain was too obvious, too raw. He said nothing.

She left. She had not asked his name either. They were not bondmates, not even really broodmates. They were only two desperate people who came together one night to make a baby. He thought of her now and then. He wished her well.

T’aki had been the first precious thing hidden in the hold he’d scratched beneath the hole in his floor. Four months tended until the larval mouth pierced the thick skin and he heard his child’s voice for the first time, blindly chirring. Six months more, fed regurgitate and daily turned, kept warm and dry and safe. Then, the molt. A son. And going to the checkpoint gates with that treasure in his arms and one thousand chits in his breeches to pay the fine, and having to watch the humans strap his squalling son to a board so they could etch his identification number on the side of his tiny head. And now he loved again. Now he had hope. Now he had someone to do all this for.

But he never should have done it, and it hurt his heart at times because after twenty years on Earth, he knew that it was a selfish love and a crazy one, and just the same as murder.

Sanford stood up and found his son’s wet clothes. He tied them to the corner of his roof where once he’d hung the sheets. If it didn’t rain, they would be dry by morning. If it did, they would be cleaner, and T’aki would just have to go without for a day, another naked child crawling on the Heaps.

Sanford went inside to the rear room where he lay down hungry beside his son and watched the boy’s limbs twitch, dreaming, until he slept.

CHAPTER FOUR

Monday morning. All the confidence she’d had over the weekend evaporated with the buzzing of her alarm. Suddenly, the outfit Sarah had painstakingly selected the previous night was all wrong and she spent so much time picking out a new one that she didn’t have time for breakfast. Which was just as well; since there probably wasn’t room for food in her stomach, on account of all the butterflies. She fed Fagin, opened the glass door enough for him to pass back and forth from the yard, checked her reflection a final time in the bathroom mirror, and walked to the office. She hummed as she walked, although she was only peripherally aware of it. Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl, for no particular reason. Not the words, just the tune, although she did stop humming to sing the Whoa-oh-oh part, a place she frequently got stuck over and would sit for hours, whoa-oh-ing under her breath while crosswording or reading until either she realized she was doing it or Kate came along behind her and whacked her in the head.

It was a warm morning already, warm and muggy, enough to make her wish she’d driven after all. The van was too big and used too much gas, the belts squealed and the engine rattled, the brakes were mushy and it took forever to get up to speed, but by God, the air conditioner worked fine. Growing up in western Oregon had given Sarah absolutely no defense against the kind of oppressive summer heat they apparently had here in the Midwest and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet.

Immediately upon arrival at her building, Sarah ducked into the ladies room to freshen up before she sweated all over herself. She was therefore six minutes late checking in, but she had to stand in a long line anyway, so maybe no one noticed. They gave her a brand-new leather case with the letters I-B-I embossed on it, about twenty pounds of forms to go in it, her gate pass, and her permanent badge with her picture on the front, still warm from laminating. From there, she was sent up to the third floor, where she followed the blinking light on her paz’s flickering screen to her assigned cubicle. It held a little baggie of generic-looking candies with a plastic pick stabbed through it that read Welcome down the side.

Sarah sat down, spent a few minutes adjusting the chair’s height, and logged herself in. Her paz chirped immediately, informing her that her client list and their case files were now available and ready for download. While that was happening—she really needed a new paz—Sarah located the third-floor lounge. She’d had hopes of a cup of coffee, but the machine was another KonaLuv. She stood in front of it awkwardly with her smiley-face mug in her fist but ultimately retreated, coffeeless. Never mind. She still had a desk and she could sit there and look professional until she had the opportunity to follow someone into the lounge and watch them make coffee.

Her paz was chirping away when she got back to her cubicle. It was still downloading, but now she also had an alert from her floor supervisor. Several alerts, actually. Wincing, Sarah snatched up her paz and followed the blinking light to his office. The man waiting for her inside was forty-ish, pudgy, bald, and expensively attired in a very nice suit that did not quite encapsulate his neck.

“Miss Fowler,” he said, except that he really said, ‘Miss Fowwer.’ All of a sudden, she was looking at Elmer Fudd in a three-piece suit, and Sarah had to bite down hard to keep from bursting out in horrifically inappropriate laughter. “I’m Edward Beechum. Welcome to IBI’s Social Services department. I hope you’re ready to jump right in.”

Weady to jump wight in. God help her.

“Yes, sir,” she said, biting her cheeks.

“Excellent.” He picked up a thick stack of papers and held them out. “We want an updated census here in Cottonwood, so you’ll be going door to door and taking detailed reports from each of your clients. We’ve tried to keep the questions simple but don’t be surprised if some of the bugs act like they don’t follow. Trust me, they all know English. Most of them speak half a dozen languages by now, so if they give you the dumb routine, don’t try to argue with them, just call in a security team and watch them miraculously understand you.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat this,” he went on, returning to his side of the supervisor-sized desk and sitting. “You are probably about to have the worst first day of your young life. Try not to let it get to you. One thing you learn in a hurry around here: The bugs do not come in peace. Do not go in there expecting to make friends. Just do your job, be professional and polite, and never let them give you guff. I cannot stress that last part enough. If they realize they can push your buttons, they will never stop. Now.” He pointed at the papers she was holding and she obediently looked at them. “Your first priority is to make sure your clients are really your clients. Don’t just ask their names, get their numbers. It’s etched on the sides of their heads.”

“It’s what?”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, I know how that sounds, but it’s fine. They don’t have feeling in their outer skin.”

“That’s not…I mean…Etched? Like…cut?”

“That’s right. With a laser,” he added, looking just a hair more impatient. In his mouth, it came out ‘waser’. The urge to giggle washed over her again and left her feeling a little sick. “It’s not like someone went at them with a machete. Look, we needed a reliable way to identify them. They don’t have fingerprints and putting together a DNA bank was just too expensive and time-consuming back when they landed. We tried to give them ID cards, but—” He flung up his hands and slapped them down again, shaking his head. “They made it impossible to keep track of them any other way. This is what we had to do, because they made it necessary.”

Sarah said nothing, but her expression must said a few things for her because he rolled his eyes again.

“Would you like to know how the bugs have responded to having their heads engraved with their registration numbers?” he asked, leaning over the desk with his hands folded. “As far as I’m aware, the only real impact has been that the three biggest forms of contraband inside the camps are unauthorized eggs, weapons, and heads.”

“W-What?”

“Heads,” he said again, smiling thinly at her shock. “We find them so often, in fact, that we had to designate one of the evidence rooms for heads only. See, they molt. Every few years, they split out of their old skin, which means they have to bring in the old head-plates to get their number re-applied. So whenever you get a bad bug who wants a clean slate, all he has to do is kill another bug, cut off his head, peel away the top plates, wait to molt, and there you go: Mr. John Smith becomes Mr. Bob Jones. The only thing we don’t find a lot inside the camps are headless bugs. Now, I suppose they could be burying them or burning them…but it’s odd that we’ve never found a grave.” He paused to gauge her reaction. “The only reasonable theory is that they’re eating each other.”

“That’s horrible.”

“They are horrible. The sooner you come to grips with that, the better off you’ll be. Stop thinking of them as these super-advanced star babies in some kind of intergalactic prison. These are bugs.”

Sarah didn’t know what to say to that, so she put the census papers in her briefcase.

“You’re working in a pretty good part of town,” he went on, looking over his own paz where, presumably, her client details were displayed. “I doubt you’ll have much trouble, but just remember, if they think they can pull one over on you, they’ll try. Never give an inch. That’s the secret to working with them,” he said wisely, holding up one finger. “Never. Give. An inch.”

“Got it.”

“Section Seventeen is single-occupancy only, which means one bug per residence unless they have a family housing permit and then only one child per adult bug. Report all evidence of egg farming and make sure every child is licensed and has a legal residence. If they try to argue with you…” His pointing finger aimed itself at her.

“Never give an inch?”

“Right. Make sure the living conditions are safe and relatively sanitary.  The bugs rent the lots in your section and they’re supposed to buy the housing units, but most of them build their own, so at the very least, make sure their power hook-ups have a valid inspection tag. Report all violations on the spot and…?”

“Never give an inch.”

“All right then.” He offered his hand and, with no comfortable way to ignore it, she shook it. “Good luck to you. Whose team will you be with today?”

“Sir?”

“The security team you’ll be accompanying,” he amplified, enunciating in that way that suggested he was running out of nerves for her to get on. “Are you with Hollister? Seeney? Lantz?”

“No one told me I had to go with a team,” said Sarah, blinking.

“What, you were planning to go in there alone? On your first day?”

Sarah’s shoulders twitched, not quite shrugging. She didn’t say anything.

He waved her off, shaking his head. “It’s your funeral. If you change your mind, just dial 99 and they’ll get a team out to you right away. Go on. Idiot,” he muttered as she was leaving his office. She chose to believe he didn’t think she could hear him.

She was one of those randomly searched on her way out of the building, chatting nervously with the security guards whose job it was to scan her for electronic devices. She offered up her paz when they asked for it, accepted the inevitable teasing about its age with good grace while they made sure the video apps and upload functions were still locked down, showed them her translator, signed the digipad where they told her to, and then went on her way to take the elevator down to the tracks.

It was a fun ride, zipping through the cramped tunnels with orange safety lights flashing by every twenty seconds—very Bladerunner, very futurific. There seemed to be a lot of soldiers standing around on the platforms, not just in uniforms, but in flak vests and helmets, carrying all kinds of guns, but they smiled when she smiled, so it must be okay. They let her out at Station Seventeen and she climbed the stairs to the surface, humming under her breath.

Outside, she was waved down almost immediately by a soldier standing by a white security van with handful of nervous-looking civilian-types inside. He was vaguely familiar to her—the same soldier who had been at the orientation seminar with Mr. van Meyer—and he already appeared to be completely out of patience with the van-load of caseworkers he was babysitting. “You Fei Yen?” he asked, jogging over to her.

“Do I look like a Fei Yen?” she asked, amused.

He looked her over, shook it off. “Shit like that don’t matter like it used to. You her or not? I want to get started sometime today.”

“No, I’m Sarah Fowler.”

He pulled out a paz and keyed that in, his frustration visibly mounting. “I don’t see you. Who’s driving you?”

“No one. I’m walking.”

“Jesus, lady!” he exploded, and just as swiftly fought it down again. He took a few stabilizing breaths, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said, tight-jawed, “Wait over there. I’ll get you on a van.”

Sarah was perfectly capable of scheduling herself a driver if she thought she needed one. For that matter, now that she had a badge and a gate pass, she could have driven her own van right through and into Cottonwood, but it seemed silly to drive clear across the village when her stretch of road—her causeway—was right off the Checkpoint. She’d studied it on the map all weekend, she felt like she’d been there already: The road ran left/right out of the gate, she would turn right and follow it about two hundred feet around a tight curve, and then it went due west right up to the aqueduct wall. All of her clients were south of that road. To the north lay a culvert and an open field with four or five concrete reservoirs and sanitation stations. And she didn’t mind walking even if she did have a couple hundred doors to knock on. She wore sensible shoes. Anyway, she felt it sent the wrong impression to show up on her first day in an armored car driven by a guy in a flak vest.

She said none of this, of course. Instead, speaking in a variation of the same soft, soothing tones she was apt to use when approached by large, unfamiliar dogs, Sarah said, “I appreciate what you’re saying, sir, but I think I’ll be okay. And if I get in trouble, I’ll be sure to call in. I think I see Fei Yen.”

He looked back with a scowl that froze the diminutive Asian lady approaching him in her tracks. “Fine,” he said. “You want to walk, walk. But let me tell you something, Pollyanna—”

How he got that from Sarah, she could not begin to fathom, but she sensed this was a bad time to correct him, so she put on her ‘listening’ face and stayed quiet.

“I lose men to those fucking bugs every year. Men with training. Men with guns. You think you’re gonna walk in there and the buggies will want to run up and be your friend? All they’re gonna see is what you are: a dumb bitch with no one to protect her.” He pushed his face close to hers, close enough that she could smell the sharp, weirdly metallic tang of his sweat. “They’re gonna pull your fucking arms and legs off and eat you while you’re still screaming. Can you appreciate what I’m saying now?”

Without waiting for an answer, even if she could have thought of one, he turned around and went back to his van. Sarah waited for him to drive off before she started walking again. The checkpoint guard asked her twice if she wanted to call a car, but finally let her through after making her show him the security fast-page setting on her paz (Dial 99 for Danger, just like on the outside) and telling her he thought she was making a huge mistake. She swiped her card—God, that felt official!—and walked through into Cottonwood.

She stopped humming without ever really being aware she’d started.

It didn’t look like the maps. That is, it did—here was the left/right road, the sharp turn, the open field beyond it on the north side, and the aqueduct wall dead ahead in the west—but it was all…wrong.

Hearing her supervisor tell her that Section Seventeen was all single-occupancy housing, she’d been expecting…well, houses. What she saw laid out in orderly rows were railroad cars, single-wide trailers, pre-fab sheds and storage pods, all of them decayed, rusted out, fallen in, and heavily patched with rotting plywood, aluminum panels and sheets of plastic. Doors were largely improvised, badly hung, with loops of rope or metal hooks for latches. There were no trees anywhere that she could see, no grass yards, no green growing things of any kind, only dry dirt and garbage stretching out for miles on every side.

The garbage. She couldn’t stop staring at the garbage. She’d smelled it, of course—even from her house, she could smell that sharp, acrid fugue hanging in the summer air—but she’d thought it had to do with the sewage treatment plant, or maybe even IBI’s own research and development wing. After all, big smells could come from strange places; there had been a paper mill back in Brookings, and on rainy days when the wind was right, it was enough to make a girl gag. She’d never imagined it was actually garbage, but this…this was a junkyard sprawled out over twenty square miles. This was a landfill, dried out and gone to rust. This was…This was awful.

Something roared—a deep, almost metallic rip of sound that made her jump and turn wildly around. She saw three aliens running behind the rows of houses. One of them stopped and crept around to watch her from the shade, but seeing that she was looking right back at it, let out another of those deep, honking bellows and took off, leaping easily up to the roof of his hiding place and from car to car in impossible strides before leaping down again, gone. The call was echoed at some distance, then again, closer, and then it was quiet.

Sarah realized her heart was pounding. God, they moved fast. And jumpers, wow. No wonder the wall was so damned high.

Now wait, what? Why did there have to be a wall at all? They were integrating, weren’t they? The ultimate goal was to bring the walls down.

She started walking again, all the way down that dusty, garbage-strewn road and around the corner. The culvert on the south side of the causeway was an open sewer, the liquid trickling along its rusty banks as black and oilsome as tar. Beyond it, the reservoirs were stagnant, fly-thick mires from which rotting cardboard, doorless refrigerators and chunks of machinery surfaced like dead hippos. The sanitation stations were skeletal pipes, most bent out of any useable shape, all rusted, without a wall for privacy or any kind of laundry services.

“I don’t get it,” she whispered.

Maybe this was why they needed the caseworkers so badly…to help clean up.

Sarah approached her first house and stood outside, staring at it. Two railway cars, side by side, patched together with plywood. It looked old, older than Cottonwood had even been standing. She opened her case, fumbled out her clipboard and census sheets, and checked the number painted on the house’s side against the checklist. Number 201040: John Byrnes.

She hummed softly, caught herself, and stepped up to knock on the pressed-wood door. She heard something move inside. Someone, she corrected herself. “Hello?” she called, and knocked again. “Sir? My name is Sarah Fowler, and I’m from IBI—”

The door yanked itself open inwards, and there he was—the alien. Seven feet, dark brown with black streaks, snapping mouth palps, twitching antennae, and dull red eyes, glaring at her. He spat out a curt series of grumbles and clicks. “Fuck off,” said an electronic voice in her ear. He slammed the door.

Her first instinct was to leave. She stifled it, nerved herself, and knocked again.

“Hello? Can you please tell me if I’m speaking to Mr. John Byrnes?”

A second spurt of insectile noise, one with no translation. Then he said, “No, you’re speaking to—” Here was what obviously had a name in it, cut up by clicks and grunts. “—but you couldn’t chew it with your mushy human mouths so you call me John Byrnes. Happy? Now fuck off.”

“Mr…Sir? I’m sorry to disturb you at home, but I have to ask you some questions as part of the new census—”

“What’s that?”

“The census? It’s where we document all the residents and their needs so we can help you better.”

“Better than what?”

Sarah glanced back at the reservoirs. “Better than this, I hope.”

There was a short pause.

The door opened again. He stuck his head out a little more, squinting at her with what seemed a little less hostility and a little more curiosity. “Who are you?”

“I’m Sarah Fowler.” She put out her hand and he smacked it away with a vulgar-sounding blatt of sound. His hand was hard, plated; hers stung where he’d hit it. She tried on a smile anyway. “I’m your caseworker.”

“What’s that?”

“IBI hired me to work with you—”

“Work with me?” He leaned back, antennae tapping at his ceiling. “Doing what?”

“For a start, I find out some information about you—”

“Fuck off.”

Slam.

Sarah stared at the door, bracing herself for a third go. She raised her knuckles.

He opened it, rubbed his palps together in a series of slow, thoughtful-sounding scrapes, then straightened up and said, “What information?”

“Okay.” She peeled back the checklist and came to her first census sheet. “Are you, um…Were you given the name John Byrnes when you were first processed?”

“Yes.”

“Can I see your, um…head?”

He faced right so that she could key the number scarring up the side of his head into her paz. John Byrnes, just like he said.

“Is this your residence?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“May I come in?”

“No.”

Sarah blinked at him, nonplussed. “Um, I’m suh-suppoh-osed—” She stopped, cheeks flaring. ‘I do not stutter anymore,’ she told herself sternly as Mr. Byrnes loomed over her, his eyes narrow and mandibles snapping. “I’m supposed to make sure your housing needs are muh-met.”

“It’s standing.”

“But—”

“You aren’t coming in without a fight, meat-sack,” he said flatly. He turned around.

“Is your power working?” Sarah blurted.

He paused in the doorway and looked back at her.

“Maybe I can inspect it from here,” she offered. “ You don’t have to let me in if you don’t want to. Just…please…let’s try to work together.”

“Why?”

“Because…” She looked around. No one was there to help her. She looked back at Mr. Byrnes. “Because that’s what this place is for. Integration.”

He coughed out a shrill, buzzing sound—a laugh, maybe—and then looked at her again, harder. “Are you serious?” he demanded, and before she could answer, he stepped out on the porch again. “The power works,” he said. “Walls are good. All the holes are patched. What else?”

“Do you live alone?”

His eyes narrowed. He snapped his palps once or twice. “Yes.”

“Okay, um…single-occupancy residences are allotted three food chits each day. Are you receiving them?”

He uttered a perfectly-obvious snort despite the very real handicap of not having a nose or any other fleshy parts to snort through. “Yes.”

“And one water tablet per day also?”

“Yes.”

“Is your purifier functioning at this time?”

He snapped his palps again. “Seems to be. Would I know if it wasn’t?”

That was a good question. Sarah pulled out her paz and typed herself a note. “I’ll get back to you on that, I promise.”

Mr. Byrnes turned his head to one side and spat a wad of shockingly thick, black stuff off the porch and onto the ground. She would not have thought it possible to smell it over the rest of the stink that was Cottonwood, but she could. “You promise,” he said, rubbing one hand over his mandibles to clean them. He looked at her paz, then at her shoes, and finally at her face again. “Go ahead.”

“Okay.” She found her place on the census sheet. “Do you have any medical needs that should be addressed?”

“By you?”

“Well, by IBI. You know, by a doctor?”

“Fuck your doctors.”

Sarah consulted her papers and tried again. “Do you have any heart problems that you’re aware of?”

“No.”

“Respiratory trouble? Trouble breathing?”

“No.”

She glanced at him dubiously. His breathing seemed kind of wet and labored to her, but she had to believe he knew better. “How about trouble sleeping?”

“No.”

“Any urinary problems?”

He snorted again and grabbed the clipboard out of her hands, turning it so that he could read it. “Why in the hell would you need to know that?”

“It’s a legitimate medical symptom!”

“No.” He flipped some papers, shoved them back at her. “Want to see?”

“Do you have any open sores or untreated abrasions?”

“What, now or ever?”

“Now, I guess.”

He looked down, running one hand over his chest. It made a wooden, raspy sound. “I don’t think so.”

“So you’re not experiencing any pain or discomfort.”

He stared at her again.

“Physical discomfort,” she amended, very aware of her surroundings. “Of…Of a m-medical nature.”

“No. How many more questions are there?”

She checked. “About fifty.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” He opened his door again, but leaned on it for a while instead of retreating, clicking to himself. At last, he said, “What happens to my answers?”

“I—I really don’t know.”

“So how are you helping me?”

“W-Well, we have to have everyone’s information so we can look at the p-problems and—”

“Look at them? You’re going to look at them?” He flung his arms out suddenly, making Sarah think split-second thoughts of orientation videos and blood flying and arms coming off. “Can’t you see the fucking problem?”

“Yes,” she said.

He stared at her, his arms slowly dropping.

“Mr. Byrnes, I want to help you. I just need to figure out how. This is supposed to help me do that.” She looked at her papers, then up at him again. The futility, the cruelty of it overwhelmed her. “I have to start somewhere,” she said in a little voice.

He clicked and buzzed a long time without speaking. When he did, it was, “Next question,” in a flat and angry voice.

He kept his answers short from that point on, and signed the form at the end so she could compare his mark on the checklist and give it an eyeball match. She wrote John Byrnes next to his alien letters and his lot number, and then stupidly stuck out her hand again.

He looked at it, and at her, coldly, then stepped back and slammed his door. “Now fuck off,” he called, and Sarah returned to the causeway, telling herself over and over that the first one was bound to be the hardest and it would all get easier from here.

She was wrong.

The worst first day of her young life. That was what her supervisor had predicted and that was just what she got. Most of her clients weren’t even home, but those that were made her work for her pay. There was Fletcher, who came staggering out from around the side of his trailer in answer to her knock, drinking something putrid from a Clorox bottle which he yarked all down the front of her leg. There was Hancock, who tacked the words, “You stinking human goat-fucker,” onto each and every one of his otherwise emotionless answers to the census, or indeed, to anything he said. There was Levin, who came flying out of his house at her knock with a nail-studded club in one hand and who kept it raised over her head when he wasn’t beating it against his door in a shouting rage. They swore at her. They shoved her. They slammed doors in her face and knocked the briefcase out of her hands. The day dragged on hour by hour, and not only did it not get easier, it got worse. Five o’clock could not come fast enough, but before it did, there was Good Samaritan.

It was his real name, or at least, it was really the name someone had assigned him. She guessed that with so many aliens to name, it was either get creative or start repeating them, but Good Samaritan? That wasn’t a name, it was a joke. Even before she knew just how meanly unapt it was, she knew it was a joke.

He lived in a pretty nice double-wide trailer, one raised up on struts, with a somewhat crudely-constructed and sagging front porch that was nevertheless better than the one on the house where she’d lived with Kate. He answered her knock in a slouching stagger, one hand raised to shade his bloodshot eyes, so obviously hung-over that her first words on seeing him were not “Hello,” but a meek and rapid, “I can come back another day, Mr. Samaritan.”

“Fuck that, you’re here now,” he’d answered, and then looked her up and down. “What the fuck for?”

She’d explained about the census in some detail (his habit of just standing there, blearily staring at her, was a deeply unnerving one and she tended to babble when she got nervous, and to stutter, which only made the babbling last longer), and it had actually started out okay, with him grunting yes or no to her questions, but right in the middle of the medical history, he’d stepped down out of his house, moved her aside, walked out to the edge of his porch, and pissed an amazing spray of pungent urine all over the alley behind him. Not a stream, but a spray, as of a hose with a thumb over the nozzle. And as he’d tied his wraparound skirt back on, he’d interrupted her stammering efforts to continue the questionnaire with, “Are you asking everyone all these pointless questions or just me?”

“Everyone. Well, I only have about two hundred clients, but—”

“Clients?” He uttered the same shrill, buzzing sound as Byrnes had done. It looked less like laughter the more she saw it. “Clients,” he said again, and suddenly reached out and squeezed one of her breasts in his hard, plated hand. “A woman,” he muttered, ignoring her flinching cry. “Why would they send a woman in here?”

She had to do something, say something, take control. Sarah took a steadying breath, tugged her blouse straight, and said, “Mr. Samaritan, I don’t think the fact that I’m a woman has anything to do with anything,” in her most no-nonsense tone.

“Not anything, huh?” And he’d looked at her with disturbing intensity, the way no supposedly unisexual worker drone should look at a human female. “Well, if you’re so sure you’re a waste of fucking space, why don’t I help you out by popping that pink head off your scrawny little neck for you?”

“I could c-come back anuh-uh-ther day, Mr. Samaritan.”

“And I believe I told you to fuck that, you’re here now. I’m just confused.” He looked her up and down, slowly, clicking to himself. “So, if I’m your client, what does that make you?”

“Your caseworker.”

He did not attempt to repeat the words, but he did nod (the gesture startled her a little) and rub at the soft patch of his throat. “Everyone gets one?”

“Yes. It’s part of Cottonwood’s social reform—”

“Are you all women?”

“Uh, no.”

“Just you?”

“I’m…not really sure how many female caseworkers are in the program, Mr. Samaritan. There were at least a dozen at my orientation seminar, though.”

“No shit.” He looked out over the causeway, the small appendages on his abdomen flexing outward so that the brushy tips could flick at the air. “Lucky me,” he mused and looked at her again. “Go on, next question.”

After that, he found a post on his decrepit porch to lean on, and there he stood, occasionally rubbing at the delicate plates between his bloodshot eyes, or picking at the palms of his hands, but answering her questions without too much trouble. His little arms—his claspers—came out now and then, and once, one of them actually bumped up against her, but he didn’t seem to be doing it in a mean way, so she just inched back a bit and politely ignored it.

When it was all over, as he finished making his mark on the last page, he suddenly said, “Want to join me for a can of bug food?”

“For what?”

“Call me a romantic, but you’re the first woman I’ve seen in years.” Samaritan pushed the papers back at her and disappeared into his house. The asthmatic screen door didn’t have time to wheeze shut before he was back with two cans with pull-tab tops. He gave her one as he stepped down off the porch, then went around to the road-side part of his house to lift the hood on the top half of a rusted, derelict car. The engine was long-gone. The inside was charred black, some kind of improvised barbeque pit. He fished around, breathing on coals until he had a bit of smoke, added some scraps of paper from the debris surrounding them, and laid in some nuggets of charcoal. When he was satisfied with that, he straightened up and casually jabbed his elbow down into the side of the can. The spikes growing out of his chitin popped through the metal with ridiculous ease. Samaritan nestled the can carefully among the coals, then wiped at his spikes and licked his fingers.

Sarah just stood there.

He jumped up onto the car’s roof and hunkered down, scratching at his eyes, then gave her a look. “You going to eat that shit cold?”

She looked at the can, as though more intense study could possibly tell her something. The can was just a can, the standard twelve-ounce size, with a pull-tab top and no label. None at all, not even a stripe of dried glue to suggest there had ever been one. Had it not been for the reservoirs and the culvert and the stench of it all, she would be starving right now—her morning was gone, noon just a memory—but there was something so indescribably sinister about that labelless can that she had no appetite at all.

Samaritan stared at her while she fidgeted. His hangover percolated obviously behind his eyes. “Woman,” he said finally, “that is my three food chits a day you’re holding. Now you pop that top and eat it.”

“If it’s your daily food allotment,” she began hesitantly, “I couldn’t possibly—”

“Good enough for the fucking bugs, but not for humans, huh?”

“No! I mean…It’s just that—”

“I know what the fuck it is. I also know that I’m making an extremely civil gesture here and you’re shitting on it. Open up that can and show me some fucking respect, caseworker.”

Hardly aware of what her fingers did, Sarah pulled back the tab. The stink of it was like a slap to her sinuses in this muggy heat. Clots of grease clung to the top in a half-inch scum. The meat beneath was the greyish color of stagnant dishwater. She lifted it up, not knowing whether she could do it or not, only knowing that she was right on the verge of tears and hating this place and everyone in it, when a black-plated hand came out of nowhere and snatched it away, knocking her sprawling in the road.

“You piss-brain fuck!” Samaritan bellowed, leaping up, but he didn’t give chase. The alien food-snatcher was over the next car and gone in two jumps.

“I have to go,” Sarah said, fumbling for her case. “I still have clients to see. But I’ll be back.”

“Oh yeah?” Samaritan clicked, resettling to watch his own can blacken. “I’ll be here, caseworker. You just knock on my door anytime.”

She went on, past a number of empty lots to a burnt-out ruin of what should have been Jamil Konde’s house. There was an alien sleeping in the corner, under a charred piece of plywood, but he wasn’t one of her clients and when she woke him to ask if she could help in some way, he just staggered off down the street and took the plywood with him. The next few houses were standing, but empty, although she was fairly sure someone was home and just hiding in the last of them. She thought she could hear the thick, oatmeal-sucking breath of one of them on the other side of the door, but Mr. Che Baccus (and that name was as bad as Good Samaritan) refused to answer, and after ten minutes of knocking and talking, she gave up.

Her paz’s clock-app interrupted her with a chirp as she turned back to the causeway, a cheerful reminder that her day was almost done and she had half an hour before it was time to punch out. She had one house left on this road—still the first road! After eight hours, she’d seen less than a quarter of her clients—and Sarah, the stink of Cottonwood in her nostrils and vomit caked on one leg, hot, tired, and feeling ten years older than the woman who’d come humming her way through the checkpoint gate into a brave new world, seriously considered going home, not just for the day, but forever. Let them sue.

But sitting in front of the house on the corner—God alone knew how long he’d been there, because she hadn’t noticed him before she’d walked up to Mr. Baccus’s house—was one of their children.

And he was cute.

He was little, that was the first thing. Standing up, he might only come to her knee, but otherwise he was a perfect little scale-model in miniature. His shell was a kind of bright bluish-green, cheerful in the sunlight, and his tiny antennae jittered like the wind-up arms on a tin toy. He was wearing a toddler’s tee, pulled up and secured with bands of electrician’s tape into something like a cotton harness. His pants were pajama bottoms, dark blue with rocket ships and stars on them, pulled up and fastened at the knee-joint with neon-colored hairties in pink and green. He was sitting in the dirt, in between the blade of a lawnmower and some massive soot-black engine, with half a milk jug and some tin cans before him, playing Trucks.

This was so obvious—his tiny palps were going triple-time to make the fundamental mmbbbbt sound—and so unexpected that for a moment, Sarah just stood and watched. The rest of this horrible day did not exactly disappear, but she found that with the help of a cute kid, she could put it aside and find it in herself to take one more census report. She headed over.

“Hi,” she said.

He looked up, then sprang up, popping an easy three feet into the air and coming down on all fours in a squealing panic.

“Jumping jellybeans!” Sarah blurted, almost as badly startled as the kid.

The door banged open and one of the big ones came out fast. “Inside,” he said, and the little one scooped up his ‘toys’ and ran. The door shut with the big one on this side of it, holding it closed with one hand. He looked at her.

He wasn’t as big as some of the others, but he was plenty big enough, and as much on edge as he clearly was, he managed to appear both intimidating and terribly alert without so much as moving an antennae. His eyes were brownish, piercing as he stared her down in this motionless stance. His chitin was a kind of olive-green, deepening to brown on his arms and lower legs, somewhat greener on his neck. He wore a flannel shirt, worn to rags and patched with duct tape, and a pair of canvas cargo shorts so threadbare that the spikes along his thighs poked through, probably helping to hold them on. He had two carpenter’s belts, crisscrossed and slung low over his hips like a gunslinger, to carry a dozen tools—among them, a screwdriver, a dentist’s pick, two remote controls, and a flashlight—and an old army-surplus ammo belt across his chest, loaded with batteries. He had no shoes; the plates of his weird feet were cracked deep and filled in again with caked, rust-red dirt. He did not speak.

“Hello,” she said.

“What do you want?”

‘To sit down and cry,’ thought Sarah, her heart sinking. She took a deep breath, explained yet again who she was, why she was here, the importance of the census.

The alien did not interrupt. He listened closely, clicking to himself occasionally, and holding her gaze with his. He kept his hand on the door. His other remained raised, splayed. He had a blunt, wedge-shaped thumb, one long forefinger and six others in descending size, until they became indistinguishable from the row of thorny spikes growing out of his forearm. She’d seen a lot of alien hands today, most of them in fists, and as she watched, talking, his became one.

“Is that your child?” Sarah asked finally, hoping to break the ice with some ‘he’s-cute-you-lucky-parent’ talk.

“I have a license,” said the alien.

“Um, can I please ask you a few questions for the census?”

He didn’t answer, just waited for them.

“Okay, to start, I have to make sure I’m speaking to the legal resident of house number 201066.

“I am.”

“And your name is—” She found the right line on the checklist. “—Fr…Fred Sanford.”

And Son.

That was it. That was the last ugly little thing. Maybe Mr. Sanford’s name had been nothing more than random coincidence, but someone had named the kid. Someone had thought that would be funny.

Sarah put her hand up over her eyes and stood very still, trying not to cry. It took a long time. She lost two tears in spite of her best efforts, felt them scorching down her cheeks, visible. The alien said nothing. In a voice that would not be steady in anything over a whisper, she said, “Please don’t make me call you that.”

No response.

“It’s a joke. It’s a nasty little joke.” Three tears. “Please do not make me laugh at it with them.”

A very long silence. Her arm began to ache from holding it up, but the instant she took her hand down and looked at him—Sanford and Son in this never-ending junkyard—she was going to break down and bawl, so she kept her eyes shut, she kept her hand up, she kept trying to breathe.

“You could not pronounce my name,” he said at last.

“Then pick another one. Please. Anything. Please.”

Click. Click. She heard a soft scrape as he took his hand from the door, a single footstep toward her. “I am used to that one.”

“But—”

“It is only a joke if I allow it to be. I do not. I am Sanford.” The word came out harsh and alien through his mouth. It helped, a little.

“But what about your child?” She lowered her hand. The sun was directly in her eyes over the aqueduct wall, making them sting all over again. “Am I supposed to call him…Son?”

“I do.” He took another step toward her and looked at her papers, then at the case resting at her feet, and at the dark stain on her leg. “Why are you doing this?” he asked finally.

“As God is my witness,” Sarah said unhappily, “I do not know.”

He clicked again, then stepped back and pulled the door open. He held it for almost twenty seconds before she realized he was holding it for her.

None of her other clients had invited her in.

She went inside.

Small. That was her first thought. Eight feet by twenty, split into two rooms with a cardboard wall at the back. The front room was a cramped but uncluttered space dominated by a sawhorse/plyboard work table on which was piled a hodgepodge of electrical parts, including a working computer hooked to a car battery through some madly-coiling homemade device that had to be an adapter. The walls and even parts of the ceiling were covered in circuit boards, keyboards, bags of screws, bolts, washers and wires, all of it very neatly hung with cords carefully bound up where necessary. He’d written things beside some of them, not in English. He’d drawn schematics over magazine glossies and pinned them along the higher side of the separating wall; below, the little alien had pinned up some of his own drawings, mostly indecipherable, but certainly colorful. There was a cinderblock-and-board bookcase on the narrow wall to hold the heavier parts, like old televisions and computer casings, and on the lowest shelf, a few books and magazines, his water purifying jug, and a toolbox. Beyond a weathered stool at the work table and a ripped-up green vinyl chair, there was no other furniture, but the look of the place was softened by a stained and threadbare carpet rolled out over the floor. The carpet was hard to look at, a naked admission that this was indeed his house and all the better he could do for it. As she stood in this depressing, fascinating tableau, the cardboard door in the cardboard wall opened a crack, just a crack.

Sarah smiled weakly, but didn’t look directly at him. “Hey there, jellybean.”

The door opened a little more, then swept shut as the big one, Sanford, came in. He climbed onto the stool, not sitting as much as simply propping himself up, since even with part of the stool’s seat carved away, part of his weird, segmented body jutted stiffly out into space. It made her give the vinyl chair a curious glance, wondering how he fit in it if a stool presented such difficulties, but there were no obvious clues.

Sanford misinterpreted her curiosity. “Yes,” he said, picking up an r/c car and removing the body. “You may sit down.”

She did. Her feet promptly began to sting, then to throb, and then to scream. She picked up her papers and filled Sanford’s name in on a questionnaire, wishing she dared kick off her sensible shoes and rub at them. Looking at the worn cracks in the alien’s feet had a way of making that wish feel faintly obscene.

She asked her questions. He gave quiet, polite answers to every one of them and wasted no words. He gave no sign of offense at even the most personal of them, and called the little one out briefly so that she could confirm the registration number that had been etched into the side of his tiny head. Property of IBI, it began. The child’s eyes were huge and clear and curious as he watched her write. He had a habit of wringing his hands, clearly wanting to touch her, but at the first hesitant stretch of his tiny arm, Sanford quickly sent him back to the other room. Before the door closed, Sarah saw a sad little bed, just sheets on the floor in a heap, with the child’s tin cans to one side and dozens of magazine pages showing the alien ship stuck to the wall around it.

“Do you know how old he is?” she asked, staring sickly down at her papers.

“How long has this place been in operation?”

“A little over three years.”

He looked at her sharply, then down at the toy he was tinkering with. “Only three,” he said quietly. For a time, he was silent. At last, he simply went back to picking at wires, saying, “He is somewhat more than two years old, then.”

She wrote that down. “So…still his first molt?” she asked, reading the next line.

“His second.”

“Really?” She brought out her paz and punched up IBI’s anatomy guide (Know Your Bug!). “He’s awfully small, isn’t he? Like…by half.”

Line Ten: Assess living situation for child. Note all unsafe conditions. Was Son malnourished? Or just short? What was her responsibility here?

“Our young molt once in the egg,” said Sanford without looking at her. “You humans choose not to acknowledge that. You would consider him to be in his first-molt stage still.” He soldered something. “But he isn’t.”

She put her papers down. “How can I help you?” she asked.

He clicked, changing out a corroded wire with a pick and his own long, inhuman finger.

“I’m here to help you,” she told him. “I want to help you.”

He snapped the car’s body back on, put it on its wheels, and picked up the controller. It came on at his command, turned right, turned left, rolled forward and back. He switched it off, removed its batteries, set it and the controller beside it in a weathered box under the table. He opened up a black plastic garbage bag, pulled out a keyboard with a cracked shell and several missing keys, and got up to lift down a second mangled keyboard from the wall.

“Do you want me to leave?” she asked.

“I will not tell you what to do.”

“But I work for you. I’m your caseworker.”

He glanced at her, put both keyboards down, and turned around on the stool to face her. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m taking a census so we can update our records and I’m introducing myself to all my clients.”

“These papers…IBI will use them to take my son?”

Sarah flinched. Note all unsafe conditions. “No,” she said firmly. “That’s not why I’m here. Mr. Sanford, I—”

“Sanford only.”

She paused, started over. “Sanford, I don’t think they’re planning anything. You were supposed to have caseworkers three years ago, it was part of the h—of the civil rights lobbying. This isn’t something new, it’s something old that’s only just now getting done.”

“And what will it accomplish?”

Honesty and exhaustion took the tact from her mouth. “It’ll shut the lobbyists up. Beyond that, I just don’t know, but I do want to help you and I will if I can.”

His palps moved, softly grinding against each other. He stood up and opened the door.

That was her cue, and a better one than she’d had all day. She walked quietly out under his thorny arm and faced him again on the stoop.

“Will you sign the census, please?”

He made his mark. She checked it against the first one, when he was just Fred Sanford and not Fred Sanford and Son.

Sanford and Son. What kind of person would think that was funny?

“I’m sorry,” she heard herself say. “This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

“I know,” he said.

He gave her the clipboard and she shut it away in her case. Movement stirred near the ground, the little one peeking out at her from behind his father’s leg. Sarah tried to smile at him.

“Take care of your dad, jellybean,” she said.

He wrung his hands, waved one, jumped back inside and hid. Sanford shut the door. He didn’t say goodbye, but then, why would he?

Sarah limped back to the Checkpoint gate. She did not sing.

* * *

That first week passed like some hellish alien version of the Groundhog Day movie: getting up each morning in an empty house that didn’t feel hers, passing a few minutes of cold dread in the office to put off going to her real workplace, and then walking through the gate into Cottonwood, knocking on doors and trying to track down at least some of her clients. The ones who were gone were gone again the next day; Fletcher was still drunk and reeling around his house; Levin still came barreling out with his nail-studded club to shout at her when she walked by; Baccus still refused to open the door (although he did ultimately answer questions through it, and sign the page she pushed through the broken, blacked-out window); and Samaritan, waiting outside every day, always had some new piece of nastiness to try out on her.

He seemed to love to make her stammer, make her blush, make her drop her eyes. He loved to hear her say she didn’t know, couldn’t help, wasn’t useful. And when he tired of attacking her as a member of IBI, he attacked her as Sarah Fowler. Personal insults, physical threats, the occasional dumping of her papers or slapping at her hands, peppered with those disturbingly direct sexual remarks which he couldn’t possibly understand.

Through it all, she looked forward to the last house on the road, but the child (she couldn’t call him Son, not even to herself) was never outside when she finished her other rounds, and the door was never open. She could sometimes see Sanford on the other side of his cracked glass window, and once she thought he looked at her too, but she had no reason to go knock on his door and so she trudged away from it and on to the next house.

There were other children, as it turned out, but they were all older than Son, or at least, they were all bigger—second- and third-molts…or third- and fourth-molts, as Sanford would say, and he’d ought to know. Those children did not play with tin cans and pin their artwork up on their parent’s wall. Like smaller versions of the adults, they watched Sarah talk with hard eyes and scraping palps, hating her with cold, grown-up hate. She tried to pretend she didn’t see it, tried to smile at them and mean it, but by the end of that first week, not only could she not imagine how it could get worse, she realized she no longer expected it to get better.

Over the weekend, her first paycheck arrived. She opened an account—not at IBI’s cute little community bank, that was too Company Store for her taste, but thirty miles away in the nearest town of Wheaton—and sent half of it back to Kate, then splurged dangerously on a thrift-store sofa and a dining set, some sheets and towels, more Chinese food, and dog biscuits. She threw Fagin’s ball for hours at a stretch, which he seemed to feel was only his due, and called Kate twice, both times trying to describe the awful slum quality of Cottonwood, and both times somehow lost control of the conversation as Kate got her to enthuse about her new house, the yard, and what fun events were coming to the community center.

“Well, so how are things there?” she’d asked Sunday night, beginning to feel a little bereft as Kate yet again interrupted a description of the reservoirs to talk about how great it must be to have a free community pool right down the street on a hot day like this.

“What, in Brookings? Nothing changes here. Roof still leaks. Floor still sags. Cops still come howling through three times a night.” Kate laughed a little, sadly. “My radio’s gone.”

“Heh. I never realized how much I did that. No one wants to sit with me on the monorail.”

“How do the roaches like it?”

“Kate!”

“I’m sorry. How do the bugs like it?”

And what could she say about that? There wasn’t anything else to call them. Like Mr. van Meyer said, after twenty years, ‘Visitors’ got old.

“I hear them buzzing back at me once in a while.” Samaritan, in particular, would follow her all up and down the road, buzzing loudly long after she’d fallen silent, droning in her ear like a giant cicada until she wanted to scream at him to shut up, just shut up, except that would undoubtedly make him happier. “I don’t feel much like singing in there.”

“It can’t be all bad.”

‘Well of course you’d say that, you won’t listen to me tell you how bad it is,’ Sarah thought peevishly. “I guess it isn’t. The residents are a little…slow to thaw, but they’re not like people say they are. They’re not scary. And there is the cutest kid in there.”

“How do you have a cute giant bug?” Kate laughed.

She could feel herself starting to get angry, genuinely angry. The first words that wanted out of her were not defensive ones or even explanations, but a perfectly nasty, ‘When did you turn into such a bigot, Kate?’ only, where do you go from there? They’d done five years of cold hostility and hurt feelings, and they were supposed to have put it behind them. They were family now, they were closer than they’d ever been…only where was all this bug-talk coming from? Sarah couldn’t remember ever hearing Kate talk so casually about roach-this and bug-that, and it really bothered her to hear it now, especially when she was working for those people and supposed to be on their side.

“He’s cute,” she insisted now. “He’s little and green and just so jumpy, he’s like—”

“A grasshopper,” Kate interrupted.

“Is that it?” Sarah snapped. “Are you done now? Why don’t you tell a few more bug-jokes and get it all out of your system? Oh, here’s one: Why did the bugs come to Earth? Because someone left the light on, har de-freaking-har har. How do you keep bugs out of your back yard? Move the trash cans to the front. What’s the difference between a bug and a bucket of shit? The bucket.”

“Oh, come on,” said Kate, plainly uncomfortable. “It was just a joke.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was a cheap dig and I’m sick of hearing them. These are my clients. I’m not going to help you make fun of them!”

“Sarah…” Kate began, but then just sighed. Her image skewed away as she dropped her paz into her lap.

Sarah picked at the sofa arm, silent, and watched Kate’s ceiling pixelate until her sister picked it back up and aimed it properly.

“Okay, well…it’s great to hear from you, kiddo. I’m glad to hear you’re doing so well and having so much fun down there. Maybe I’ll come out someday and visit. It sounds fabulous. Got to go now.”

“Fine.”

A short pause. A gentler Kate said, “I love you, Sarah. You know that, right? You’re all I’ve got.”

That was better. Sarah made herself let go of the tightness in her chest and breathed it out as a sigh. “I love you too, Kate. Bye.”

But it wasn’t forgiveness and it still bothered her.

Sunday’s dinner was take-out in front of the TV, sitting on her new sofa. Then she and Fagin went to bed, where she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling and wished she didn’t have to get up in the morning and go to work. Eventually, she slept.

Woke up.

Went to work.

She bumped into Mr. van Meyer and his soldier-friend in the halls at the office, said polite things when he asked how she was getting on, and really thought she was doing quite well at coasting through the conversation when out of nowhere, van Meyer said, “We do not see you at the weekend social, Miss Fowler. Why?”

“Weekend…what?”

“We do enjoy our outdoor leisure, while the weather is good. It is such a narrow window here, they tell me. I am accustomed to the heat, myself—it is for me a homesickness—and so I enjoy it more than most. Not all of my camps are so agreeable to outdoor recreations.”

“I didn’t know there was a party,” Sarah said, doing her clumsy best to sidestep his question. “I guess I’m still getting settled in.”

“I see. Of course, we wish our employees to be comfortable in their work.” He paused, his eyes as dark and empty as a shark’s. “Where is it you are from, Miss Fowler? Did you say Sacramento?”

“That’s where we were camping that one time, but I’m actually from Oregon.”

“Ah yes. Far from home,” he mused. “Have you any family with you? Children?”

“Just a dog.”

He considered that for some short time and finally sighed. “This concerns me, Miss Fowler.”

“Sir?”

“IBI is not a company, do you understand? We are not a job here. We are not the work of one summer, weekends and holidays. We are doing the work of the world. We are all that protects the bug from Earth and Earth from the bug. We cannot do this with strangers. We must be a family. You will come to the next social, ja? Meet your family. There is swimming and sports.” He thought about it, hunting out the word he wanted. “Barbeque.”

“Yum,” Sarah said weakly.

He looked at her while his soldier friend shifted restlessly beside him. “You like barbeque, of course?”

“Sure. Who doesn’t?”

“I don’t,” the soldier remarked. “Even when the wind is blowing, the smell is fucking rank. You could cook up a whole fucking pig, it would still taste like that canned shit the bugs eat.”

Sarah didn’t think she reacted, but van Meyer’s vaguely disapproving glance snapped back to her and narrowed. She had to say something, so she said, “Yeah, I’ve seen their food. It’s pretty gross.”

Van Meyer studied her.

“But they seem to like it,” she added, feeling the lie all the way down to the pit of her stomach, which still wanted to clench at the memory of that greyish, greasy meat and the smell of it cooking over Samaritan’s makeshift stove. Good enough for the bugs, he’d told her. Good enough for one of them to steal, anyway.

“Ja, the food.” Van Meyer nodded sympathetically. “I see that it bother you. Bother me as well. Or did. When I was young and idealistic and still trying in my well-intentioned way to force the bug to be human.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It is this: the bug’s nutritional needs are not ours. They require protein foremost, salts, fats. The Bureau of Immigration does not merely house bug, but must feed him. We give the bug his daily requirement of nutrition at our cost, our considerable cost.”

“I understand that, Mr. van Meyer. I mean, there’s so many of them, but—”

“Ja, so many. I make what deals I can with companies that, as abhorrent as the idea once was to my sense of justice, provide the best and most complete nutrition. And is not so terrible as it appear. Here at Cottonwood, we have canning plant on site. We contract to all local farm and ranch, to purchase any surplus animal or other material USDA deem unfit for human to consume. For human, nee? Not bug. For bug, is perfectly suitable. Optimal. We process and package here, use all local labor and recycle all we can. There is no profit here. Is it pretty plate we set before him? Nee. It is not the quality I should prefer, but we choose to compromise appearance rather than nourishment.”

Sarah nodded, not convinced, but unable to argue. She kept seeing Samaritan, hearing him tell her to eat it, it was good enough for fucking bugs, just eat it.

“Now, if we find pretty name to call it, use pretty label, this takes away even more of our budget—”

“No, I see that perfectly now, Mr. van Meyer. It’s all cosmetic anyway.”

“Precisely so! Cosmetic! Ja! Now.” He patted her hand with his leathery one and squeezed once, still surprisingly strong. “The bug is permitted to keep livestock, ja, but so few do. They have no desire to care for themselves, as so many drone species found on Earth. Not intelligent. Not motivated.”

She saw Sanford and his r/c racer, his computer and that bizarre homemade adapter. She nodded anyway.

“We can only do what we can. Have you other concern at all?”

Plenty, but she could tell from his tone that the question had been largely rhetorical. “No, sir.”

“And your work?” he pressed. “Do you find rewarding?”

“I haven’t really started working yet,” she admitted. “I’m still trying to get my census done.”

“Just like any other roach,” the solider remarked. “Snap on the light and they all run. Tell you what, Pollyanna. Give me five minutes and I’ll take you in. They see me—” He hefted his rifle with a modest grin. “—and they’ll answer all your questions.”

“No,” Sarah said quickly. Too quickly. She thought hard as the soldier’s smile turned sullen. “I couldn’t possibly take you away from your job to do mine. I feel bad enough already. But thank you for the offer.”

The soldier did not reply.

Mr. van Meyer tsked. “The bug, perhaps he hide because he knows you will not create consequence. Perhaps Piotr should accompany.”

God, she really did not want to spend the morning with this man and his giant gun. “If you say so,” she said tactfully. “But I really would rather do my own work. It’s just a matter of finding them all.”

Van Meyer nodded once, solemnly. “You see for yourself how the bug avoid us, deceive us. The census is very important to our efforts here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And how many do you complete so far, may I ask?”

Sarah winced. “Thirty-nine.”

“But this is very impressive, Miss Fowler.”

She blinked. “It is?” She’d thought it was pretty awful, herself.

“Oh ja. They must like you there. You do good work, nee?”

She smiled tentatively, then more honestly.

“Good work, ja. And now, good day.”

And as he walked away, his security guy, still standing there and staring at her, suddenly spoke up with a contemptuous, “Bet you’re a vegetarian.”

Startled, and oddly offended, Sarah shot back, “Bet I’m not.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” And without warning, out popped a little ditty of her dad’s, something which had lain dormant and forgotten inside her for nearly ten years: “Carnivores win wars.”

Van Meyer stopped in his tracks midway across the floor and looked back at her, smooth-faced with surprise for one instant before he erupted in hearty laughter. The soldier’s smile was slower to spread, but it did, and with a certain reluctant admiration. “I like that one,” he said.

“Oh ja! That is good! I must remember, and so true besides! Danke, Miss Fowler, what a pleasant way to begin day. Piotr, at your convenience?”

The soldier gave her an unlooked-for and unwelcome clap to the arm which hurt a little, but actually seemed sincerely cheerful, and went to catch up to his boss. Sarah watched them go, still smiling, hoping what he’d said about good work was true even though some part of her (a damned broad part of her) didn’t trust him.

She was singing to herself on the monorail again (My Baby Takes the Morning Train, just the chorus, over and over), shut up to swipe her card at the Checkpoint gate, and started in again on the other side (Dolly’s Nine to Five). The cry went out. The smell closed in. She got started.

She found Will Hobart and Jules Verne at home today, although Verne was just leaving and didn’t want to answer the questions. When she asked if she could come back again the next day, he took her case and threw it on top of his house, then stalked off.

She spent two hours trying to climb up and get it down. The ladder that had been a part of the trucking trailer he lived in had rusted out. She tried to climb it and went flat on her ass with shards of metal in her hands. There were no trees to climb, nothing light enough to drag over that was still sturdy enough to stand on. The roof remained two feet over her head even when she jumped. Two hours.

Bang. Tak-tak-tak-tak. Samaritan looked over the edge of the roof and down at her.

She stood, dirty and sweaty and already thoroughly miserable, and finally said, “I lost my case.”

He looked back over his shoulder. “What a coincidence. I just found one.”

“May I have it, please?” she asked, without much hope.

“I love to hear you beg.” He walked back along the trailer, out of sight, and returned with the case in his hands. Samaritan said, “Catch.”

She reached up for it.

He popped the latch and flung the case’s contents wide. Hundreds of carefully-arranged papers flew, caught wind, rattled out over the reservoirs and down the causeway. Requisitions, incident reports, case notes, resident files, Hobart’s completed questionnaire, all of it. The heavier stuff—her paz, manuals, her map of Cottonwood, some pens—rained down over the road. Samaritan closed the case, hopped down to stand beside her, and gave it to her.

“Say thank you,” he prompted.

“You know, it is possible to be oppressed and still be an asshole!” she snapped, snatching up her paz and wiping rust-red dust on her thigh.

“I’m sure it is, but why tell me? No one’s oppressed in here, caseworker. We all need to be taken care of, right? We’re all just a bunch of dumb bugs.”

She left him there and started cleaning up as much as she could. Useless effort, useless. The papers were ruined, garbage. They belonged where they lay, indistinguishable from all the other garbage, but she couldn’t just leave it. She grabbed soggy handfuls from the culvert’s crumbling bank and started stuffing them back into her briefcase. Papers floated on the dark water just below her. She knelt down on the cracked and unstable ground, leaning out over the rancid pollution of it, and tried to reach them.

“You know we piss in that,” Samaritan said, no longer out by Verne’s house, but directly in her ear.

She yelped shrilly, jerking away from him, and the bank gave way beneath her. She had a moment’s disbelief and weightlessness and then she splatted down face-first into ten inches of tar-black garbage water and alien pee. It got in her hair. It went down her shirt and soaked into her slacks. It splashed into her ears and her nose and her mouth. Right into her mouth.

He started laughing as she sat, spitting and gagging in shock. Not mean laughter, either, not really. Great big, delighted laughter. The kind that ought to have a joke attached to it.

She burst into tears, hating him, and started snatching up papers.

From there into the field, dripping and reeking, stumbling over rocks and half-buried debris, chasing every fluttering flat of white into the reservoirs, wading knee-deep in sticky sediment that sucked the shoes off her feet and kept them, climbing through the rusted pipes, limping over jagged spears of metal and broken chunks of concrete, and hearing at every step the gleeful hoots and mocking buzzes of Samaritan, watching her.

It felt like it took hours.

“You missed a few,” he said when she crawled back over the culvert.

“Fuck you.”

“Ordinarily, I’d be tempted.” His claspers twitched outward and retracted with an exaggerated flinch. “But that is really killing the mood.”

She turned her back on him, started walking.

“Where are you going?” He stepped in front of her and again when she tried to go around him. “You don’t have to go.”

“I nuh-need a sh-shower.”

“You certainly do,” he agreed. “But you don’t have to go. I’ve got a shower.” His claspers brushed at her, flicking up under the hem of her skirt to nudge with surprising force at her bare thighs. “Don’t play coy,” he said as she stumbled back. “You’ve been showing me your ass all day.”

“Leave me alone!” she shouted. Shouted, at a client. She tried to push past him, but he caught her by the arm and his grip was as good as handcuffs. “Get off me!”

“I’m not on you.” His palps spread and snapped. “Yet. Come on, caseworker. Let’s get those nasty things off you and get something nasty in you.”

She swung her briefcase at him. He knocked it aside, pushed his claspers a final time under her skirt, and let her go.

“Run,” he said.

She fled, fresh sobs tearing from her chest and Samaritan’s buzzing laughter chasing her down the causeway. The checkpoint guard saw her coming and still made her wait, sauntering out from his little hut to look at her badge like he hadn’t just seen it, like she wasn’t clinging to the gate while the sun baked the stink of ditch-water and alien piss into her clothes, her shoes, her hair.

When he finally let her through, she ran to the monorail station, but her efforts to wash up in the restroom there were grossly insufficient. She couldn’t bring herself to board, knowing that every other passenger in that narrow, closed car would have to see her, smell her. She walked home, half a mile through IBI’s clean, ultra-modern homes, bringing the stink of Cottonwood with her. There were kids in the landscaped yards, staring. There were cars, slowing down as they passed her by.

Once home, she stripped and showered and hung on Fagin’s neck and bawled until she used up all her moisture and had to stop.

Sitting there on her kitchen floor with Fagin pressed in canine sympathy against her chin and the stuffy headache that comes from too much crying swelling behind her eyes, Sarah thought about quitting. Sure, they might sue her, but they couldn’t take money she didn’t have, so what was the worst that could happen? It’d be a black mark on her permanent record (right there next to that note from the seventh-grade when she’d stolen a dead frog from the biology lab and put it in stuck-up Trina Bridgewall’s pudding), but so what? The places where she usually worked didn’t care whether their employees had references, a prison record or even a green card. She’d get by. Kate would take her back. She’d get the I-told-you-so looks and lectures for the rest of her life, but Kate would take her back. They were sisters. Family meant more than anything and nothing, nothing, was worth this.

Her paz chimed.

Sarah wiped her face, which had been dry for some time but which was almost certainly blotchy and gross, and crawled across the floor to her briefcase to dig it out of the trash. Only after she answered it and saw an IBI security guard’s face did she recall she was still wearing nothing but a labradoodle and a towel. She supposed she should care. She didn’t.

“Sarah Fowler?”

“Yes.”

“Just touching base. You left Checkpoint Seventeen at 11:45 and haven’t passed any checkpoint since. Where are you?”

“Where does the locater in my paz say I am?”

His eyes narrowed. Otherwise, his expression did not change. “It says you’re at home.”

“Then you know where I am. I had to change. I’ll be back soon, just let me get dressed.”

The security guard’s face showed neither surprise nor concern. “If you would like to make an incident report at this time, we can do that right over the phone. Do you know the name of the bug involved?”

She opened her mouth, not to give Samaritan’s name, but to ask why he wanted it, but that was a stupid question, wasn’t it? He wanted it so he could round up a posse of IBI’s soldiers and go handle things. She told herself she wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but without looking at that too closely, she did take a moment to imagine walking down the causeway and never having to hear Good Samaritan’s crudities again.

It was a bad moment, but it ended.

“Involved in what?” she asked.

Impatience carved a notch between the guard’s heavy brows. “Ma’am, can we cut the crap? Checkpoint Seventeen reported you left his gate in great distress—”

“Nothing happened,” Sarah said.

“Ma’am, all hostile action taken by the bugs must be reported.”

“I fell into a ditch, that’s all. If the gate guard thought I was in such great distress, maybe he shouldn’t have made me stand outside the gate dripping alien sewage-water until I had my stupid girly breakdown. Now you want to make me feel even worse about that, you go ahead. I fell into a ditch, I came home and got a shower.”

The security guard’s eyes in the small, flat monitor were blatantly derisive. “Fine,” he said. “But I’m just going to remind you that if you are ever involved in a hostile situation inside the containment area and you fail to report it, action will be taken.”

“It wasn’t a hostile—screw you, then,” she finished dully.

He’d hung up on her already.

Sarah shut off her paz and tossed it back in her briefcase. She sat with Fagin for a few minutes more, then got up and took another shower. She had to go back to work and she knew it, but that didn’t mean she had to go back to Cottonwood. If she could find just one piece of paper that needed filing back in her cubicle, she would find a way to file it all damn day, but she wasn’t going back. Not yet. Not today.

Maybe not ever again.

* * *

Sanford came back from the Heaps close on to dark to find a slip of paper half-under his door. He picked it up, heart throbbing, expecting to read NOTICE OF TRANSFER or something worse in the human language, but it was instead a blank form for the ordering of emergency supplies: food, water tablets, charcoal, light bulbs, soap, even things he’d never seen in any camp, like fire-resistant blankets, propane ovens, and solar-heated portable showers.

Puzzled, Sanford sent T’aki inside and walked down the road to Sam’s house. “Do you know anything about this?” he asked.

Sam glanced at it and gave out a loud laugh. “She missed that one.”

There was only one ‘she’ he could possibly mean and it made the mystery no clearer. Sanford looked at the paper again, thinking of the human, the caseworker, beginning to feel a faint sense of guarded optimism. If he actually had a propane oven, or even just a propane torch—!

And then Sam told him.

“She was out there all day,” he finished, laughing again, so hard that his words were scarcely intelligible. “You should have seen her. God, the stink! Made my eyes burn. Crawling out there in the piss, running water out of her head and picking up papers! I thought I was going to go blind laughing!”

“Zhu’kwe,” Sanford said, and turned around.

“That’s what she said. More or less. Hey, come on in a second.”

Palps snapping, Sanford followed Sam into the trailer. Open beer cans were everywhere—on the floor, on the counters, in piles knee-deep—every one half-filled with rancid beer. The stink was almost a physical thing, as intended. Humans went where they wanted; the only defense was to encourage them not to want to go where they should not be. Also, the beer drew clouds of flies, which Sanford did not consider a benefit, but he could see a net hanging on the wall next to a box of baggies to indicate Sam did. He could taste chaw in his throat, but he did not spit. Protein was protein and chits were chits, and if Sam found people hungry enough to buy his horrible trade, who was Sanford to condemn him?

Sam popped the false panel to the rear room and the scent of chemicals overblew that of old beer. He’d been brewing, making drugs for the humans most likely, but this was not what he wanted Sanford to see.

There was a yang’ti incinerator on the wall.

“Doesn’t work,” said Sam, watching Sanford heft it down. “Can you fix it?”

“Perhaps. Where did you get it?”

“Under the floor at Jefferson’s. They took him away last week. He had it hidden pretty good too. And he had this.”

Sanford’s glance showed him part of an ancillary output cable in Sam’s hand. Only part, but it was the part with the connector-plate.

“Can you fix it?” Sam asked, tapping the gun. He bounced the cable in his hand, as he’d dangled meat over T’aki.

Could he fix it? Should he? Ko’vi the Creator might Himself shudder to think of Sam armed with such a devastating weapon. Sam had been familiar to him even before all…this…which meant he was not a civilian. Not that familiar, so he probably wasn’t a soldier, but he might still know the operating codes for the incinerator, and if so, Sanford would be responsible for whatever damage it went on to do in Sam’s hands. And that was assuming Sam wanted to use it and not sell it. If a functional incinerator fell into human hands…but the cable had a way of drawing his eye.

“Yes,” he said.

Sam tossed him the cable. He caught it with the hand not holding the gun. It felt heavy. Not salvaged as badly as it appeared, perhaps. He could feel his antennae wanting to quiver.

“Want a beer?” Sam asked. “Or something stronger? I got some good ferment in the back.”

“Not now.”

“Something to eat? I can get this shit cleaned up in a minute. Stay awhile.”

“Not tonight.”

“Fuck you then, I’ll go out.” His eye fell on the paper now tucked in the waist of Sanford’s breeches. He chuckled. “Think she’ll be back again?”

“If she does come back,” Sanford said without planning to, “leave her alone.”

Sam paused and drew back, his head cocked and eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“What do you think will happen when you succeed in frightening her?”

Sam blew air through his palps derisively. “She’s not going to do anything, she’s an egg.”

“She doesn’t have to do anything,” Sanford said, “except come back in a white van with more humans who won’t be impressed by your games.”

Sam held his arms out stiffly from his sides and trembled them. “This is me, shaking with fear,” he said solemnly. “Oh fine, I’ll ease off. But you should have seen her crawling around with her ass in the air.” Sam laughed again, but his eyes grew distracted. He was quiet for a moment and then he shook it off and gestured at the door, muttering, “Get the fuck out of here, I need to go.”

Sanford left Sam heading north over the rows and returned to his own house, where T’aki sat in the back room, playing. He looked at the cable first, then broke down the incinerator and had a look inside.

“What’s jellybean?” T’aki asked, rolling an empty can back and forth between his hands.

Tapping at the trigger-lock, Sanford clicked a distracted, “I don’t know.” After several minutes’ work, it occurred to him to ask why.

“I think they jump.”

“Perhaps.”

T’aki came out to climb on the table and watch him. It made him uncomfortable, his son and the weapon, but there was no room to perform this examination below and not enough lighting.

“How many suns does our world have?” the boy asked finally.

“Just one.”

“Is it hot?”

“All suns are hot.”

T’aki blew air through his palps and looked away, at Earth’s sun.

“Don’t do that. You’ll burn your eyes,” Sanford said. He thought the problem might be in the channeler, and if so, the gun was dead. The only way to get another channeler was off another incinerator. That was the problem with too many of these things. None of them were built to last twenty years.

That stirred up thoughts of the ship, unpleasant thoughts like strips of funeral wind blowing through his heart. Twenty years was not so unreasonable a time to expect the ship to remain functional…but he doubted it had another twenty years in it. Surely not when it had been left to hover above Earth’s ocean, abandoned and left to deteriorate, save by the humans who might still be prying it apart.

He could not afford to nurture these thoughts. Sanford blocked them stolidly from his mind and focused again on the gun.

“When are we leaving?” T’aki asked, coming to the table’s edge to watch him. “Is it soon?”

“I don’t know.” He paused, reached out and rubbed the boy’s head. “Do you want to go outside and play?”

“No. Father…what’s roach?”

Sanford patted him, then sighed and put down his tools. He picked up his young son and pulled him onto his lap. “It is a word humans use to mean yang’ti.”

“Like bug?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a bad word?”

Sanford hesitated. “It is a lazy word.”

“Do we have bad words to mean humans?”

“Some.”

“What are they?”

“I do not teach my son lazy words.” And suddenly, he thought of the caseworker and how she’d stood in the sun, covering her eyes and silent because she would not speak his name, the unknown joke he had been given. He looked down at T’aki. “Who called you a roach?” he asked.

T’aki was evasive. “I heard it on the Heaps.”

“And who called you—” His mouth could not make the word as easily as his son. “—the other word?”

“The case woman.”

Sanford thought. “Then it is probably not a bad word,” he said slowly, unsure why he believed it. “You can ask her. She may come tomorrow.”

“Will I have to go in back?” T’aki asked cautiously.

“Not if you behave.” Sanford gave his son another pat, then set him down and picked up the gun again. “Go out and play, if you like. Stay close.”

This time, T’aki scooped up his toys and ran outside.

Sanford removed the channeler’s casing and had a look at it through his magnifier-frame. He thought of the woman. Hours in the piss-mires, picking up papers in a land already thick in cast-off paper…

And then he put her from his mind and got to work.

CHAPTER FIVE

She went back. Of course she went back. One paycheck half-spent did not give her the courage to test IBI’s enforcement of that breach of contract clause. She asked for and received (with a heavy sigh and a lot of eye-rolling) new forms and questionnaires, and she rode the tracks, and she walked in through the Checkpoint gate with her head held high past the same jerk guard who’d seen her leave yesterday.

“Still no car?” he asked, smirking at her. “Some people never learn.”

“President Dufries says we all have to do our part to conserve energy,” she replied piously. She refused to use a bodyguard to do her job. She was helping people, damn it.

“Suit yourself, doll. But do yourself a favor and dial 99 the next time someone looks like they’re going to work you over,” he said as she swiped her card. “You get killed in there and it reflects real bad on me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

The gate shut behind her. The howl of alien alarm went up. Sarah heaved a breath and started trudging down her causeway. It seemed to her that the cries howling out of the alleys were different today, just a little bit broken, like whoever was doing it was laughing at the same time. Maybe he’d seen her leave too.

Hobart was sitting in the shade next to his house. He stood up when she came near and walked out to meet her. “You lost my census report,” he said.

She blinked at him, feeling her cheeks crawl with embarrassed heat even though she knew she hadn’t lost a damned thing. “I—I’m sorry, there was a—”

“Hurry up,” he said. “I have things to do.”

Startled, she fished out a new form while he stood there, annoyed and impatient, but perfectly polite. She asked the questions and he answered them, leaving out all the nasty remarks and swearing he’d sprinkled yesterday’s census with, trimming it all down to “Yes,” “No,” and, “Is that it?” Then he walked with her three houses down and banged on Jules Verne’s door with his fist.

Someone inside spat out a wordless snake-like rattle.

“Get your husk out here, you piss-drinking pain in the ass!” Hobart snapped, and dented in the side of the trailer with a hard kick.

Verne opened the door and glared at them.

“God, guide my hands before I wrap them around your useless neck,” Hobart said, and pointed one long black finger directly into the other alien’s face. “Be nice. You know nice? Nice is what I am when I don’t kick your chitin open. Behave your fucking self.” He turned around and looked at Sarah. “We’re done, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

He stalked off, muttering, and left the two of them alone.

“Get on with it, meat-sack,” said Verne.

She fumbled out a second questionnaire, and twenty minutes later, she was tucking it back in her case and walking away, a little shell-shocked but pleased. Encouraged. Happy, even. She caught herself humming twice, stifled it, then went ahead and let it happen. Things were looking up. Maybe the bad days were over.

And there was Samaritan, sitting on his car with a pop bottle dangling between his knees, staring at her.

Her stomach tightened up as she neared him. She tried not to look at him, but her skin crawled, expecting at any moment his sarcastic greeting, the first insult, the first touch of his hand.

Nothing. He ignored her.

She didn’t breathe easy until she was not only past his house, but the two empty lots beyond it. Then she had to look back, just like Orpheus in the mouth of Hades, to make sure he wasn’t sneaking up behind her.

He was watching. He waved, sending a mocking buzz at her, and took a long drink from his bottle.

Oh wow, it really was going to be a good day. She headed for Che Baccus’s house (it bothered her that he wouldn’t come out. If she could just see for herself that he wasn’t sick or injured…) and stopped when she saw Sanford’s door swing open.

It stayed open. Empty, but open.

An invitation?

Sarah started over, uncertainly at first, then quicker, lighter, when he didn’t shut himself away again. She reached the house, hesitated, and knocked on the wall. “Sanford? It’s Sarah.”

Nothing from the big one, but the child popped through the door at once. “I can behave,” he announced, wringing his hands.

“Well, you’re one up on me at that age,” Sarah answered, taken aback. She smiled. “Is your father in?”

The child pointed. Sarah peeked in and there he was, his back to her, working. “May I come in?” she asked.

Silence, but for the tinker and tap of his work.

It didn’t feel right to barge in, even with the door open. Sarah loitered, losing some of that buoyant feeling, and finally stepped aside, moved some hubcaps, and sat down in the dirt. She thought his head turned towards her, just slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

The child disappeared and then came scuttling out with his tin cans and milk jug. He gave her a can and sprawled in front of her, carving a quick road in the loose layer of rusty soil for his trucks to ride on.

“How you holding on, jellybean?” she asked. “You and your dad doing all right?”

“Yes. What’s jellybean?”

“Oh. Well, it’s a kind of candy, I guess. It’s just what my dad used to call us kids when we jumped around a lot. Jumping jellybeans.” She scraped some dirt into a mountain and marked it with some burnt pieces of plastic. It had been a long time since she’d played Trucks. She wasn’t sure she was doing it right. “Does it bother you?”

“I jump a lot.”

“Better than I ever did.”

“That’s because your legs are on backwards.”

Sanford clicked loudly inside. The boy looked back and his antennae lowered.

“They still go all the way to the ground, just like yours.” She reached down to scratch at some sand on her ankle, and the boy stopped making truck noises to watch. “I guess as long as they still do that, I can’t complain.”

“What are you doing?”

“Um?” She looked at her tin can and then at him. “Driving?”

“What is this?’ He made clumsy scratching motions over his leg.

“Oh. It’s nothing. I’m not used to the weather down here. My skin is dry.”

He stared at her. “Isn’t it supposed to be?”

“Well, yeah, but if it gets too dry, it itches.”

“What’s itches?”

The question took her completely by surprise. She stared at the boy in his unfeeling chitin shell, and finally stammered, “It’s…It’s kind of a more serious tickle.”

“What’s tickle?”

Sarah laughed a little. “Kind of a frivolous itch. I don’t know how to answer, honey. It’s just the way skin feels.”

He studied her, all of her, wringing his hands together. “It looks soft.”

“It is, relatively. Want to touch?”

Another loud click, hard enough to hurt her eardrums. The boy turned around and said, “She said I could!” in a protesting wail.

“It’s okay. You won’t hurt me.”

“Where?” the boy asked, his eyes moving hungrily up and down.

“Anywhere.”

“But where anywhere?”

“Anywhere.” She laughed again. “Skin can feel everything.”

He stared, pale eyes widening. “All over?”

“Yep.”

And now narrowed, suspicious. “Close your eyes.”

She did, smiling, and felt his tiny brittle hand poke her thigh. She touched the same place herself and said, “Here.” Her arm. “There.” One tiny finger on her cheek. She copied. “Right there.” And then a fourth touch, and she opened her eyes, blushing, to put an end to the game. “Yeah, I felt that, but for future reference, that’s not a polite place to touch.”

“Oh.” He eyed her chest curiously, then popped off the ground like, well, a jellybean. “I know why!”

Away he ran, and swiftly returned with a folded page from a magazine to thrust under her nose.

And suddenly, she was looking at Miss February from an esteemed gentleman’s periodical called Cyber Sluts. And Miss Feb was an adventurous little lady with a lot of power tools. “Oh wow,” she said, startled.

“You’re a woman,” the child said proudly. “Like her.”

“Well, yes, generally speaking, like her.”

The boy took his picture back and sat down slowly, smoothing the page out over the dirt and staring at it. He made a constant, low, staccato purring sound as he gazed at it, but that stopped when he looked up at her again. “Do you do that?” he asked.

“I can honestly say I never have, no,” Sarah admitted, eyeing the model and her visual aids. “Although I suppose there’s really nothing stopping me apart from a shop-vac and some self-respect.” Gently, she took the page from him and folded it again. She looked at the open doorway behind her; it remained empty and quiet. She supposed the least-offensive thing to do would be just to let it go, but that would mean leaving pornography in the hands of a minor. What was the responsible thing to do here? Tentatively, she said, “Honey…do you know what vulgar means?”

The boy’s excited posture became subdued, uncertain. He glanced into the house too, where his father sat out of sight, perhaps listening. “Is it…like a bad word?”

“Close. Bad words are bad because they’re vulgar, they’re lazy and mean-spirited, which is why we shouldn’t use them. But words aren’t the only things that can be vulgar.”

He looked at the paper in her hands. “Pictures too?”

“Some of them. And I know you have to have a lot of vulgar things around you sometimes. We can’t really control what gets said next to us, or put next to us…but we can control what we take home with us.”

He gave her an intense and puzzled look. “You sound like Father,” he said.

That was a relief. “I think that’s a good person to sound like, don’t you?”

“Sometimes. I have to pee.” Off he ran to the culvert, leaving Sarah holding Miss February.

A plated hand came through the door to take it. She heard it unfolded and then silence. “I did not know he had this,” he said at last.

“It’s kind of everywhere, I’m sure. I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn, I just—”

“He needs to hear such things from more than me.” Wood creaked. He came to the doorway, crumpling the page absently in one hand. He tossed it out into the street and it drifted away on the breeze until it fell into the ditch and soaked up with black. Sanford watched it sink, then looked at her. He clicked, glanced away a few times, but kept coming back to her. At last, he said, “Will you come inside?”

He would ask after her butt fell asleep.

Sarah struggled onto her knees and then up (“I told you they were backwards,” said the boy, breezing on by into the house), and managed a dignified stagger until she could collapse on the green, overstuffed chair. The boy climbed up and sat on the arm of it. His father resettled himself on the stool, but facing her.

“I found a paper of yours,” he said, and passed it to her.

“Oh.” Dull heat flooded her cheeks. “I must have missed that one.”

“Can you really order these things for me?”

“I don’t think so,” she admitted, scanning it. “It’s for emergencies only. Like, if a tornado sweeps your house away, that sort of thing. Then you can order them. In theory.”

“I see.”

“What did you want? Maybe I can get it through another channel.”

“I wanted to know what qualified as an emergency condition.”

She felt herself blush again and dropped her eyes.

“How do you do that?” the boy asked.

“Mr. Sanford, I’m trying—”

“Sanford only. I know you are.”

They sat there, the three of them. The boy kept touching her hair, surreptitiously, watching closely to see if she could feel him.

At last Sanford stirred himself, looked at the child, clicked to himself for a moment, and then said, “His name is T’aki.”

“T’aki,” said the boy, stroking her hair.

Surprised, she tried, minus the click in the middle. Hard, short T; broad a; strong ‘key’ sound. It wasn’t the same.

“Close enough,” said Sanford. He looked away.

They sat.

“You did not write it on your form,” he said finally.

“As far as they’re concerned, he has a name.” She hesitated. “Do you want me to change it in his file?”

“No. But I will not stop you.”

“I work for you, remember?”

He clicked, staring at her. The boy, T’aki, touched her ear, tracing it in quiet awe.

“So, um, I don’t mean to offend you,” she began, very aware that she was probably about to. “Do you have garbage service in Cottonwood at all?”

Sanford’s head cocked.

“Trucks?” she asked. “That come for the garbage?”

T’aki made the engine-idling sound.

“Yes,” said Sanford.

“There is?” Gosh, what a relief. “Do you know when?”

“Every day.”

“Now see, this is something I can help you with!” she said, excited. “I can pick up some heavy bags and maybe some tags for the larger stuff and we can start cleaning up, um, around your house, because the situation here with the trash is kind of terrible, but I can help!” she finished quickly.

“Put in bags?” T’aki chirped. Now his head was cocked too.

“For what reason?” Sanford asked. He didn’t look as though he didn’t know. His eyes were calm on hers.

“To take it away. Sanford, I can see that you work hard at keeping things in check, but some of what you’ve got lying around here is dangerous, particularly for a small child to—”

“Trucks don’t take away,” T’aki said, utterly baffled.

“That’s because you have to bag it up, jellybean, then they’ll…”

Sanford was just looking at her.

The trucks came every day.

How did busted lawnmowers and old refrigerators even get into Cottonwood?

The Recycling Program.

Sanford stood up and opened the door. “Would you like to see?” he asked.

“No,” she said numbly. She felt like she’d been socked hard in the stomach; her guts twisted on her, sick and cramped and sinking. “But I think maybe I’d better.”

T’aki jumped down and ran out the door ahead of them, chirping something her translator gave back as, “Heaps! Heaps! Heaps!” Sarah’s feet carried her out the door and she walked behind Sanford on the rust-red road out beyond where it turned at the end of the causeway and followed the aqueduct wall.

It was a long walk, past the trailers and storage sheds where aliens who could have been her clients watched them pass and sometimes followed for a while. They left her territory and continued walking on streets she knew only from her map. It wasn’t until they’d left the tenebrous borders of Section Seventeen that Sarah understood how it could be considered the ‘upscale’ side of town. The droning shrill of summer insects scraped across the constant click-and-buzz of alien speech until she might as well be deaf, but she still had her eyes and she saw it all—row upon tumbled row of ramshackle structures resembling chicken coops more than homes, choked with flies and with people. The streets were nothing but tire-tracks in the garbage where noisome fluids pooled, forming swamps of filth knee-deep around the leaking aqueduct Sanford followed as he led her even deeper into Cottonwood. She pulled out her paz, holding it before her like a talisman against the terrible power of this place, as if the tiny blinking light she saw in its little screen was the only proof not only that she was really here, but that she could get out again.

The houses did not appear to be thinning out, but they must be, because beyond their rusted, sunken roofs, Sarah could see the razor-wire coils of a tall mesh fence, and beyond that, nothing. But the smell was getting worse. She tried to brace herself, because by now she knew what she was going to see, but the mere intellectual idea of the Heaps could do nothing to prepare her when she squeezed out between two miserable shacks and saw it.

It was a pit. A pit the size of ten city blocks, surrounded on all sides by a tall chain fence crowned with razor wire. The roads where the trucks came through criss-crossed mountains of compacted trash, forming an intricate pattern which was almost pretty at this distance. Up close, she supposed it would be like disappearing into a maze, walls of unstable garbage on every side, and only one true path up and out.

There were hundreds of aliens in there, hundreds of them. They crawled over the trash, over the Heaps, picking through the human waste for treasures to put into sacks, into boxes, or even into their own mouths. She saw children as small as T’aki burrowing in and out of crevasses, chasing things that eluded adult eyes, or just chasing rats, which they squabbled over like candy bars. She saw someone pull a scum-heavy swath of fabric out of a mound of rotten food gone black with decay, shake the worst of it off, and wrap it around his own waist to wear. She saw three aliens together leap on the same broken section of aluminum sheeting and begin a fight so fierce, she thought someone was going to be killed. And everywhere she looked, there were more of them.

Sanford’s hand closed on her shoulder. She realized she’d been walking slowly forward into the fence, hypnotized by the horror of it. When she looked at him, he pointed up, at the sign that showed cartoon lightning bolts and a cartoon alien with Xs for eyes.

“You have to use the pass,” T’aki explained, bouncing restlessly ahead of them, anxious to move. “These wires are for don’t touch. You have to go to the Heap-station. Come on!”

“This way.” Sanford kept going, giving the fence a wide cushion, but following its perimeter towards the sound of shouts and crashes and thumping music, all closed in by crude lean-tos and trailers.

Realizing this was about to get even worse, Sarah followed him into Mr. van Meyer’s award-winning Recycling Program.

There were a lot of humans here, all of them soldiers with flak vests and guns. They lined one side of the wide road, walking back and forth in a bored way, manning stations with signs like Colored Glass and Newspaper, and passing out white food chits or unlabeled cans of bug food while they smoked and watched TV. Most of them were congregated by the tall gateway to the Heaps, where armed guards checked passes and waved aliens through, selling garbage bags and cardboard boxes to those who hadn’t brought any, and occasionally driving someone out of the line with kicks and blows from the butt of a gun. One of them saw her, nudged another guy, and suddenly they were all staring her way. It wasn’t a good feeling.

Aliens passed in and out of the Heaps, running empty bags in and dragging bulging ones out to be sorted at the recycling stations. Of course, the really good stuff—the doors, the wood, the sheets of plastic—they kept for themselves, but most of it was sold for chits. A lawn-bag filled with glass bottles went for two chits. Six lettuce boxes full of magazines, each dragged by a child T’aki’s size, went for only one altogether. Three adults carried out an honest-to-God thresher blade over to the Scrap Metal station and received just five chits for it.

But recycling wasn’t all that was happening here. The road was lined on both sides with slapped-together huts and kiosks where aliens loudly bought and sold. Trade your sundries here, they bellowed. We buy cloth scraps and sell clothes. Building supplies here—glass, planks, bricks, tape, siding, nails, rope! She saw a butcher’s stall where a father hacked apart enormous rats and his son served up raw chunks in paper cups for two chits, whole roasted ones for ten. One enterprising alien had built a water tower and sold two-minute showers under its spigot for five chits, ten with soap. Multitudes of stalls operated as thrift stores, selling worn but working items like fans, radios, televisions and media players, toys, clothes, books, even bicycles. Most of them seemed to know Sanford; she saw quite a few beckon to him before spotting her and then hesitating. Sanford ignored them all and watched her.

This was the recycling program. How many trucks came in each day? From how far away? Was it all household garbage, or was there hospital waste, chemical waste, fun toxic acids stewing away at the bottom of the Heaps and just waiting for the right sunny day to combust? Saves the surrounding communities eighteen million dollars a year, the manual said. Gives the bug a means of income, to teach him about our economy and our system of trade. Six boxes of magazines for one chit; three chits for one can of food whose main ingredients were probably bones and guts and whatever vermin fell into the grinders.

“Sanford, I…” She swallowed hard, suddenly miserably certain she was going to throw up. When it passed, she made herself look at him. “I don’t think I can stop this.”

“I know.”

“We find it there!” T’aki called at some small distance, pointing out on the Heaps. “And Father fixes it! Then—” He ran down the road to point at the stalls. “—we sell it there!” Hop hop hop, happy T’aki. “Want to? Want to? I’ll show you how to find things!”

“Not today,” Sanford said. He was still watching Sarah.

‘I didn’t know,’ she wanted to say. ‘I’m not part of this. This can’t possibly be happening, not here, not now. This is wrong. This is so wrong.’ But in the end, she said only, “I have to go. I have…other clients.”

“Will you see us again tomorrow?” he asked.

She dragged her mind out of the Heaps and stared at him. “Do…Do you want me to?”

“The boy likes to see you.”

“I like to see you,” T’aki agreed, wringing his hands.

“Then I’ll be back.”

Sanford turned around, clicked to bring his child into step, and walked away into the confusion of the alien marketplace. He did not look back, but Sarah stared after him until long after he had vanished. Then, because she still had so many census reports to take and because IBI’s guards were all watching and mostly (no matter how guilty and human it made her feel to admit it, even in the confessional of her own silent thoughts) because it smelled so bad here at the Heaps, she left them there and got back to work.

* * *

Van Meyer spent the day engaged in video conference, which was not, in all truth, the worst way to spend one’s day. As men in monitors droned on through their mostly unnecessary reports, Van Meyer meditated upon his youth. It amused him that he felt stirrings of nostalgia for that lost time, for smoke and blood and the taste of gun-oil, for sweat by day and freezing night, for bombs and burning and always the threat of treachery. But yes, he could remember pleasure as well, that kind that only comes from seeing what one’s own hands make or unmake. It was very different now, to direct the work of ten thousand hands while his own grew soft.

Over the course of that day, eleven long hours, two fine meals, and the midday attentions of a skilled woman (he did not often feel these urges—ah, lost youth!—and indulged them with delight and gratitude whenever convenient), he heard from the operators of each camp, reporting what progress there was to report in his absence.

In Fox Lake, his developers had succeeded in recreating the bug’s incendiary weapon and in five of eight tests, had successfully melted a surplus Iranian tank to slag almost instantaneously. Of the remaining tests, twice the weapon had misfired and lastly, exploded. Fortunately, the testing grounds were quite remote and the developers hoped to have an improved model ready for demonstration when van Meyer made his annual return to their facility.

One of his mines at Brackendale had collapsed, halting production there and killing some three or four hundred bugs, as well as half a dozen human guards. Van Meyer expressed polite condolences and was assured the mine would be reopened when and if feasible. In the meantime, shifts could be increased at their sister-camp, Silverbrook, to keep the Russians whose homeland the camps occupied from seeing any decrease in mineral profits. Van Meyer gave his approval at once. He was close to finalizing a similar arrangement with the Chinese and he knew their informants would be watching this development very closely.

In other news, construction at Cedar Creek was once more back on schedule and was expected to be ready for its first shipment of bugs by the end of the year. Now that the Australians had repealed their long-standing ban on bugs, he could break ground on two more camps there, at which point Fairfield, his first immigration camp, would close for a much-needed remodel. There had been, he was told, a Name-the-Camps contest in Queensland schools. The winning entries were Beauty Gunyah and Cobber’s Corner and one of them had been submitted by an eight year-old girl. In a wheelchair, no less. The possibility of a photo opportunity was cautiously raised and van Meyer gravely acquiesced. He thought he might arrange for a child-bug to be present, perhaps to give the girl some small award. The young ones were easily trained and mostly trustworthy.

Finally, the current leader of his operation at the ship gave his usual report of enduring incompetence, but after so many years of such reports, even that was losing its sting. It did no good to rail against the men who worked on his behalf; men could not open the doors and the ship defended itself quite efficiently against those who tried to cut their way through. Only the bugs knew the ways and means of access and damned few had ever surrendered their knowledge. In all these years, van Meyer had seen less than ten percent of the great prize hovering over Earth and of that, never an engine, never a power source, never a weapon beyond what could be held in one’s hand (and most of those still eluded him as well). It was a fine line he was forced to walk—while the ship continued to hover, he must be patient and work slow, knowing that at any hour, some unseen mechanism within might fail and he would lose it all to the hungry sea.

There, his mind wandered while the reports continued, rousing only as the conference came to an end. There was some small chit-chat. Van Meyer acknowledged whatever came his way, but did not hide his distraction. Soon the monitors were black and he was alone with his restless hyena.

“And what of our own progress, eh?” Van Meyer switched off his own console and leaned back in his broad, leather throne. “Do we call social reform of Cottonwood success?”

Piotr looked away, perhaps unmindful that his sneer was caught and ably reflected by a dozen conference monitors. “If that’s what you want to call it,” he said, civilly enough.

Van Meyer smiled and gave his dog a pat. “Ah, but there is a need. I know how tiresome it is, to pander to these overfed notions of, ha, inalienable rights. But it is a small inconvenience to endure so that I may acquire thousands of fresh sheep under the very eye of homeland shepherd.”

“Yeah.”

“You do not approve.”

Piotr shrugged, using the gesture to scratch at his neck and adjust the fit of his shoulder holster. He was not afraid to have his own opinions, his Piotr, but he did not put them before those of his master.

“Perhaps you think we do not need more sheep. Perhaps you think this—” He gave the barrel of Piotr’s plasma rifle, reverse-engineered from a bug weapon, a small shake. “—is all we need.”

Piotr put his hand protectively over his violated rifle and glowered, saying nothing.

“The arms race will never be won, my friend. There will always come bigger guns and more men to hold them. Come. It is late.” Van Meyer rose and made his way stiffly out into the dark hall, trusting his hyena to follow.

Piotr did not speak until they were waiting together for the elevator. Even then, his face was calm and his voice level when he finally said, “Maybe we shouldn’t be selling them.”

“Nee?” van Meyer said tolerantly.

“The bug-guns. The ones we’ve rebuilt. And the ones we haven’t,” he added after a moment’s hard thought. “Yeah, especially those.”

“It would be a bad mistake to ever appear that we hoard these things,” van Meyer told him. “Understand, we have friends in other nations only for so long as we share our toys.”

Piotr grunted a sullen acquiescence and punched at the elevator buttons again.

“It is a delicate act of balance,” van Meyer said, watching him. “We must always be prepared for war, but we must never be the first to strike. When the moment come, we take the hero’s role. This is why we must not underestimate the power of public opinion. You may not see the value of bringing sheep into our fold, but every person who wear IBI badge is a person who may someday hold IBI gun. We must be sure they fire it for the right reasons against the right people.”

Piotr looked at him, his thoughts like fists behind his eyes. He said, respectfully, “You know six of our new heroes were caught trying to sneak pictures out of here.”

“Ja, of course. It is axiomatic. Human curiosity. But do they succeed?”

“Someone’s going to, you wait and see, and if you think the buggie-lovers are in your face now, just wait until they see inside the roach motels.”

“In every new endeavor, risk. But human response can be easily manipulated, when human nature can be predicted. You tell me six of our sheep attempt to betray the shepherd. I tell you, eighty-two sheep see inside the roach motel and do nothing. Why? Because they also see the bug.” He paused, then curiously asked, “Has Cottonwood ever had bug escape?”

“Yeah, a few, when we were moving them in. Not escapes, exactly, but they got over the wall and out where the yokels could see them before we got them.”

“Retrieved?”

“Shot.”

“Ah. So there has been no true escape. Arrange one.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want the bug seen. If he attack, kill, this is best. Let the villagers call out to us to save them, ja? Let there be no doubt why we keep them behind walls.”

The elevator doors opened. They boarded. The car descended almost silently, but in an empty building, every little sound scratched unpleasantly on the ears. Piotr shifted, glaring up through the ceiling tiles at the offending cables. He would be trouble tonight, if he were not swiftly brought to heel.

“Easy, easy, old friend,” he said, squeezing at his hyena’s shoulder. “Soon, we go to Dapplegrey, away from American eye, from American sheep with signs to wave in front of cameras.” And a place to let his hyena off the leash at nights, until he had run this black wind out of him. This he did not say, but he could see his faithful pet thinking it, always aware of his master’s mind. “And before then, perhaps we make a little time to see to our good work in Zero, ja?”

“Yeah.” The stiff set of Piotr’s shoulders relaxed slightly. “Yeah, that’d be good.”

“Then we do. Soon.”

The elevator car slowed to an early stop, chimed, and opened. A security guard stepped forward, only to pause, unsure whether or not to intrude after he had recognized them. Van Meyer gave a polite nod, but it was Piotr who reached out and caught the door, holding it open. This surprised him—his hyena was not known to extend even casual pleasantries—but once he’d looked out past the guard, van Meyer saw the reason.

There was a light burning over the dark rows of cubicles in the social services department, a single lamp, at nearly half-gone eight. Even the cleaning crew had come and gone.

The security guard followed their eyes, shrugged. “She checks out,” he said. “Just working late.”

It was nothing, he was sure, but van Meyer stepped out to investigate regardless. He suspected he knew who he would see and he was not disappointed.

Pretty Pollyanna was deep in her papers. She did not look around, but continued to read, turning pages one after the other and singing gravely under her breath. “I know there’s poison in your loving…I know there’s a demon in your skin…” She paused to bring up a new window on her monitor and check what she read there against the manual in her hands. She frowned and turned the page, reading. “And I know I’ll always be there when you invite me in. So don’t tell me that you love me…because I know it isn’t true…Love is, love is…love is…” She raised her hand and touched a line in her manual, pinning it in place. “Dangerous.”

“We keep you very late tonight, Miss Fowler,” van Meyer said.

She jumped with a girlish scream, one hand flying to her throat, the other shoving papers so spastically that the topmost of them tore. Piotr laughed. His predictable hyena.

“My God! Mr. van Meyer! You scared me!” She looked around, her cheeks flaring pink, disoriented. “Oh. Oh wow. It’s late, isn’t it? I lost track of time.”

“What is this so fixating your attention, mm?” He reached for a paper and thought at first she might try to snatch it away, but in the end, she did not. She watched him read it, her eyes anxious. “The legal rules and restriction of our Recycling Program. Well well.”

“I…I was out there today.”

“An impressive operation, nee?” He handed back the paper, but did not immediately release it. “What exactly is it that concerns you? Oh, you are concerned,” he said calmly as she began the expected protest. “I would go so far as to say you are disturbed. This—” He brushed his hand across her papers, tapped her paz, finished with a knock on the top of her cubicle’s monitor. “—makes for such dense, dry study that only deep concern or financial reimbursement could lure one to read it. Your time is your own at the moment, Miss Fowler, and therefore, you are concerned. So.” He gestured to Piotr, who fetched a chair from the next cubicle over. He sat, folded his hands on the corner of her desk, and gave her all his attention. “Tell me.”

She ducked her head, abashed and rightly so, sweeping papers together and probably hoping he would forget about her if she stayed quiet long enough. Eventually, the silence would break her and she would make the usual mutters about the smell, the possibility of contamination beyond the wall, the health risk of working alongside a landfill. And because it had been a good day and he had some small affection for her, he would forgive these mutters, assuage her fears, and send her on her way. In the matter of the recycling program, he had nothing to hide.

These thoughts did not come to him in so many words, but only as a general feeling. He would not have had time to think it all out in words anyway. In certain situations, stillness could be as effective as hammers and pretty Pollyanna was predictably fragile.

“It was disturbing,” she confessed, avoiding his gaze. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t…that. It was just so…big.”

“By necessity. And you must remember, the waste treatment services that we provide benefit more than just the bug. We operate within legal guidelines regulated by EPA the same as any other landfill site. What the bug do not salvage is treated in a variety of ways and eliminated. It is all perfectly legal, perfectly safe.”

“Oh I’m sure it is!”

He gave the papers strewn across her desk a meaningful glance. “Somewhat less than sure, I should say.”

She began to sweep them together, blushing. “I wasn’t looking at that at all.”

“Then I must confess to some confusion, Miss Fowler. What were you looking at?”

“Nothing, really. I was just…I was thinking…”

“Ja?”

Another pause, longer than before, and then she suddenly said, “I was just thinking that we could maybe help them do more with it.”

Van Meyer felt his eyebrows climb. “More?”

Rapidly now, still staring fixedly at her hands, she said, “You know how all the scientists think the aliens are these worker drones? Well, I was watching them and for worker drones, they’re really not working very hard. I know how that sounds,” she said, stuffing papers quickly, almost frantically, into her case. “But I was thinking about ants and how ants are, like, constantly working, and our aliens are only kind of crawling back and forth a little…and I don’t really know that much about ants…and I don’t know anything about the aliens,” she said hurriedly, giving herself a charming slap over the eyes and rubbing it in. “Oh, I’m afraid this sounds just awful, but maybe the reason they’re all so apathetic is because they’re not doing what they should be doing…they’re not working as hard as they ought to be.”

“My dear, it sound as though you want to tell the bug what to do.”

“Well.” She kept her face covered, but her cheeks were now the dull red of dying coals. “Maybe they need to be told.”

Van Meyer glanced at Piotr. His hyena eyed the girl, much of the day’s frustrations eased by thoughts better not explored.

“Ants have queens,” the girl was saying. “It’s not completely impossible to think that the aliens need direction too. I mean, look what they do with the recycling program! They don’t all go out there, but the ones that do are out there all day. They must like what they’re doing, right?”

“Mm.”

“So…So I was looking to see what our restrictions are and if there’s a way to kind of expand the programs a little without expanding its…I’m not sure of the word I want…its scope? Its effects? More trucks bringing in more garbage isn’t the answer, but maybe we can get more good out of what’s already in there. So there’s less waste.”

“What did you have in mind exactly?”

That stumped her some. She kept glancing at him and away, as though unable to believe her opinions were still receiving his attention. It was flattering.

“Well…there are a bunch of reservoirs next to the causeway where my clients live and they’re just sitting there, stagnant. The residents don’t know what to do with them and I don’t think they ever used the sanitation stations…those are rusted completely out. The aliens are actually, um, urinating in the culvert…anyway, there’s a lot of non-recyclable organic material in garbage, like, oh, food and cardboard and stuff like that, so I was thinking…compost heaps.”

“Compost.”

She looked directly at him then, her eyes wide and clear and bottomless. “We could clean out the reservoirs and the aliens could turn them into compost heaps. They could mulch up all the good stuff they find that they can’t recycle, stuff that’s just rotting where it is today, and turn it into good gardening material. Then they could, I don’t know, either bag it and sell it back to the community—that would be such a great improvement on their image, plus it could defray at least some of the cost of feeding them—or they could use it inside Cottonwood.”

“But the bug do not grow food.”

“No, but some of them do have livestock.” She was speaking faster now, more earnestly, warming to her own idea. “And if they grew enough food to feed their pigs and sheep and stuff, they could take care of themselves better and we wouldn’t have to do it as much, you know, with the canned food. Of course, more cows means more compost, but see, then more aliens would be working. If we could get enough of them motivated, we could actually make the immigration camps self-sufficient.”

He studied her, his Pollyanna, his angel of innocent enthusiasm.

She dropped her eyes and sat quiet at her desk. “So that’s what I was thinking,” she said. “And there’s nothing in the restrictions to stop us from making changes, as long as we only change what happens inside Cottonwood. We’re kind of…We’re kind of on our own here, from what I’ve read.”

“Ja,” he agreed, still smiling. “Our own sovereign nation, so to speak.”

“If it worked,” she said, “maybe we could start, I don’t know, more labor-intensive stuff. They could…build real roads in there, or permanent housing, or water towers or even irrigation lines and real plumbing. Or even maybe do things outside Cottonwood, where people could see them and see that they’re nothing to be so scared of.”

“Outside, you say?”

“You could call it an outwork program, like they have in prisons.”

He chuckled, patting her head. “Such difficulties we would have with the human rights criers of this country. Bad enough they wail at President’s door day and night that bug is not enough protected, but if they see bug building highway, then it become slave labor.”

“Oh. But…But if they’re happy, shouldn’t that be what matters?”

“It should, but not in this country, not yet. But this is good thinking.” He tapped his temple, smiling at her. “In Buena Vista, the bug already quarry. In Golden Plains and Dapplegrey, the bug work in textile plants. In Silverbrook and Brackendale are mining and industry programs. As soon as Cedar Creek is to open, forestry contract begins.”

The girl’s lashes fluttered in surprise. “Really?”

“And in every camp, recycle. And in meantime, poor bug still breed.”

Her brows knitted. She looked away. “Yes, they do.”

“But even this serve a greater good, nee? Camps become more crowded, and then more camps must be built. As more countries see how successfully we teach the bug our work ethic, we hope to see more, what did you call them? Outwork program. Do you know what this is, Miss Fowler?”

It would have been a rhetorical question to any other sheep, but before he could answer himself, Pollyanna nodded, gazing deeply into her own open case.

“Integration,” she said softly.

He began to think he’d been wrong about this one.

“This,” he said warmly, resting his hand on her shoulder, “is how human and alien integrate. When human see the bug ready to work, to help build better world under human direction, so will come greater freedom for the bug. Of course, there will always be a need for the camps, but I foresee a future when these camps can be used only peripherally.”

“As training centers,” she said.

“Precisely. And perhaps some small security and re-education services. The psychology of the bug can be challenging. So you see, we think of these things already. But you, you worry only about your own clients for now.”

She accepted the gentle rebuke with downcast eyes and flushed cheeks. “I’m sorry, Mr. van Meyer. It wasn’t my place.”

“I like to see ambition in my employees, Miss Fowler, and I think that you go far with this company. Your heart is in the right place. If, in future, you have ideas, there is suggestion box outside Alien Affairs department, nee? Anonymous, but please to sign. I like the way you think.”

“Thank you, sir.” She gathered herself, closed her case and switched off her light. “Good night, sir. Good night, Mr. Lantz.”

“Good night.” Van Meyer stood aside and watched her leave, her little shoulders slumped. “Pretty Pollyanna,” he murmured, after the doors had closed behind the round swing of her hips. “And what are we thinking, old friend?”

“I wasn’t listening,” Piotr replied indifferently, but he was still staring after her. “Woman talks too much, like her tongue was hung in the fucking middle.”

“Ja, ja.” Van Meyer stirred himself and gave his hyena a smile. “I don’t think I shall need you tonight, Piotr, if there’s someplace you’d rather be. Do enjoy yourself, but, ah, keep away from the paddocks, nee? I think I keep that sheep a little while.” He laughed.

After a second, Piotr joined him, but it was forced. He went his way, and van Meyer went on alone, his thoughts cheerfully distracted.

Ants and workers. Carnivores win wars. Training centers. If Pollyanna could think such things, he had hope for all humanity.

CHAPTER SIX

Another day dawned, hot and grey and reeking the way only an open landfill in August in southern Kansas ever could. Now that she knew it was there, it was impossible for Sarah not to imagine the Heaps this morning: the trucks would be coming in soon and the lines would be forming outside the gates as aliens got ready for a full day of picking through garbage.

Sarah indulged in a few more of these bleak thoughts, but just the fact that she could indulge in them while lying in her memory-gel bed in the back of her two-bedroom house with her Konaluv waiting for her to come into the kitchen and ask it for some coffee made her feel even worse. And what good did that do? Whether or not she slept in a bed or drank coffee made no difference to the living conditions in Cottonwood, or any other camp, for that matter. Feeling bad didn’t fix anything.

Sarah got up, fed Fagin, opened the back door so he could access the yard when he was ready, and took her morning shower. It was too hot because she still hadn’t found her perfect TruTouch number, but she was tired of fussing with it, so she just got in and out as quickly as possible. With shampoo suds sticking to her feet, steam coating every surface and her mind wandering bleakly through the Heaps, Sarah stepped out of the bathtub and promptly slipped. Her legs skewed in opposite directions; she dropped hard, straddling the side of the tub bareback, which was admittedly not as painful than if she’d been a boy, but certainly the sort of landing that would be with her for a while.

Immediately, it became one of those days.

She put a run in her stockings getting dressed and had to change into slacks so she could get away with not wearing any. Fagin promptly brushed up against her when she called him in from the yard, depositing enough fur on her slacks to build a brand-new puppy. She wasted a little time trying to pick it off, then ducked into the guest bedroom for one of the few boxes she had left from the move which she hadn’t unpacked. She hadn’t even really labeled it. Sundry and Misc, it said, and way down at the bottom, underneath old magazines she might want to read again and t-shirts she’d found after packing her clothes and bank statements going back ten years, she found a roll of duct tape. A thousand uses, the commercials claimed. Lint-remover was something like Number Thirty-One. Thinking of that made her think of Sanford and she wondered where exactly ‘patch pants’ fell on that list of useful applications.

She lost track of time de-furring herself with the sticky side of wadded tape, realized there was no way she could catch the monorail now, and resigned herself to driving to work in her own van. She was halfway to the Checkpoint when she realized she’d left her badge clipped to the first blouse she’d put on that morning, the one that went with the skirt she wasn’t wearing. She drove back and got it and was on the verge of walking out her door when her paz chimed. And thank heavens, really, because her paz was in her briefcase, which was over on the kitchen table, being left behind for the second time that morning. Rushing to answer it before whoever was calling got transferred to voice mail, Sarah stubbed her toe a hell of a good one on the table leg, so that her greeting was a yelping, “Ow, shit-dammit!”

“Miss Fowler?”

Her paz’s screen was still pixelating, but a slight Fuddian softening of the L gave him away anyway. Mr. Birch or Beech, she couldn’t remember exactly, but what mattered was that he was staff supervisor on her floor and therefore her immediate boss.

“Hello, Mr…” Which tree was he? Or maybe it was Busch. “I’m sorry, I’m running late, but I’m on my way,” she blurted, hoping he wouldn’t notice the pointed pause where a name ought to be.

He cut her off with a curt wave of his hand and said, “You’re the one with that godawful child-molester’s van, right?”

Sarah blinked. “It’s not a child molest—”

“But it’s yours?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Great. I need you to come to the office and go see Ms. Heinrich in H.R. Bring the van.” He hung up.

“My van does not molest children,” Sarah said to the black screen. With that on record, she gathered up her briefcase, gave Fagin a desultory pat, and headed out the door.

The Human Resources department was not in the same building where Sarah worked and once she found it, it took some time to track down Ms. Heinrich, who was apparently not having the best day either. She was a plump, older woman, meticulously made-up and coiffed to appear career- rather than family-oriented, and all she wanted to know as Sarah introduced herself was whether or not she had her own car.

“Yes, ma’am. I have a van.”

“Oh for God’s sake!” the other woman exploded, snatching up her own sleek new paz. “I specifically told that idiot we can’t use company transportation as delivery vans! Although why not is something I would dearly love to have explained to me.” She flapped a hand at Sarah and turned around. “You’re done, honey. Go back to what you were doing, which is probably sitting around on your ass waiting for someone to need a driver since I apparently don’t qualify!”

“Ma’am, I’m not a driver. I mean, I do drive, it’s just not an IBI van. It’s my van. The, um, the big blue one?”

Ms. Heinrich’s broad face puckered up as if Sarah had confessed to driving an occupied hearse. “You mean that four-wheeled environmental disaster actually has an owner? I thought it crawled onto the lot and died. Never mind, it’s actually perfect for this. Come with me.”

Sarah trailed after her as she bustled importantly through a maze of cubicles to an honest-to-God corner office and began rifling through her desk. There was a couch in the office. And a bar. Sarah’s cubicle didn’t even have room for a motivational poster.

“Ma’am, um, no one’s told me what I’m supposed to do yet.”

“Relax, honey, I’m getting there. Take these.” Ms. Heinrich handed back two sheets of paper and moved on to a modestly intimidating floor safe. She came out of it with a black credit card with IBI’s logo boldly printed across one side in holographic letters. She scanned it through her paz, punched a few buttons, and held them out. “And this.”

“Okay…?”

“We’re getting in yet another batch of hires and naturally it’s absolutely life-or-death that they get an ice cream social. You may have been wondering why they’re closing the pool to the public tomorrow.”

Sarah nodded, although she hadn’t checked the community calendar for events in more than a week, even after Mr. Van Meyer’s subtle warning, but she needn’t have bothered. Ms. Heinrich was off and away, sorting through her mail caddy and flicking at her paz and talking the whole time.

“As usual, when the brass waves their magic wands, it’s up to me to pull the rabbit out of my ass. Pardon my mouth, but every single weekend for the last three months, I have to stop what I’m doing and turn into Bozo the goddamned Clown, and after they promised me we were finally done with that horseshit, they suddenly turn around and give me twenty-four hours to put together an outdoor event? How am I supposed to get anything done around here?” she demanded.

“Um…”

“Never mind, rhetorical ranting. Okay, what I want you to do is drive that ridiculous gas-guzzler of yours to town and buy everything on this list, only pay attention. I want you to look at the decorations.”

Sarah obediently shuffled the proper sheet to the top and looked at it. It was exactly the sort of itemized list she would expect this woman to have for her—separated first by store, then by general purpose and finally alphabetized, with the required quantity and estimated price per item noted and a neat box to one side, waiting to be checked.

“Don’t bother getting more tables or coolers or torches because we have plenty, but do pick up at least two dozen of those fruity little candles that repel bugs for the tables…Do you need to write this down?”

“Yeah, I guess I’d—”

“You’ve got fifteen hundred dollars on the card. Every penny you save not buying coolers, use to buy extra sodas and hamburger junk because, despite accounting’s bizarre notion to the contrary, people are going to want more than one.”

“Sodas and burgers,” muttered Sarah, tapping at her paz. “No coolers…or tables…”

“Or torches, but on second thought, do get oil. Oh! This is very important! Do not under any circumstances actually get these things at the Cook Nook and Party Palace unless you absolutely have to. The ShopALot will have almost everything and if you feel like driving all the way to Cheluca Creek, there’s a WalMart. It’s much cheaper. Any extra money—”

“Burger patties and buns.”

“And soda. If you want to sneak yourself something to drink for the ride home, I won’t tell, but please don’t get your groceries on the company dime.” Ms. Heinrich paused over her paz to study Sarah’s shocked expression. She smiled in a dry and distinctly unpleasant way. “Not that you ever would, of course.”

“I’ll bring you the receipts,” said Sarah tightly.

“Oh dear, I’ve impugned her honor. Tell you what…” She gave Sarah a ‘wait here’ point and went back into her desk drawers, emerging in short order with a sheath of papers. She signed it in a few places and passed it over. “Take this in lieu of an apology.”

‘Application for Community Event Funding’ headed the top of each page and in addition to a standard list of barbeque essentials like hot dogs and cupcakes, there were places to request pool toys, bouncy houses and inflatables, even live entertainment.

“I can’t accept this,” said Sarah, attempting to hand it back.

“Careful you don’t get a nosebleed in that tower, princess,” Ms. Heinrich said archly. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like fun?”

Stung, Sarah pushed the papers out further. “I don’t know anyone.”

“All the better reason to take it. Invite everyone in your department. If you don’t like your coworkers, invite your neighbors. Hang a notice on the community calendar and invite all the singles. Have an orgy, I don’t care. The brass love to see people having fun and this way, they even to get pay for it. You still need Accounting to sign off on your final estimate, but just follow the cardinal rules—no booze, no single item over a hundred bucks, no non-residents on IBI property—and they shouldn’t give you any problems. Make it a family event and you’re practically guaranteed approval. Management is really pushing the idea that this bug-infested hellhole is family-friendly.” Ms. Heinrich checked the time, then picked up her paz again and shooed Sarah toward the door. “Have security log your mileage in and out and I’ll see about getting your gas reimbursed, but don’t expect that today. Bring everything back to the main plaza service entrance. I’ll try to have someone there to take your receipts and help you unload, but I can’t guarantee anyone after six, so hurry.”

Sarah hurried. She supposed she could have simply left the funds application on Ms. Heinrich’s desk, but she didn’t want to look any prissier than she apparently already did. It was just as morally correct and a whole lot easier to toss the thing in the trash in private, and she would. Having the director of Human Resources coach her in how to most effectively cheat the system so she could get IBI to pay for extra soda was bad, but yeah, okay, accountants were stingy and it was for IBI’s own people; being offered the means to use what she’d learned to throw her own personal party (in lieu of an apology, no less) was worse, especially when it meant wasting money on a bunch of strangers for no real reason right outside the containment walls, where twenty-five thousand aliens struggled to feed themselves in a garbage-based economy. She tossed the application on the floor of the van as soon as she got behind the wheel and just tried not to drive angry.

But it was thirty miles to Wheaton, and somewhere along the way, it occurred to her that beginning the day in a bad mood made it awfully easy to find reasons to stay there. Ms. Heinrich had probably meant well. Throwing a party for a couple hundred people every single weekend could put some rough edges on anyone. Having it sprung on her only a day in advance made her bad day a lot worse than Sarah’s. She could be the bigger woman here.

‘That lady was twice as big as I am,’ she thought peevishly, but only once and she was a little ashamed of herself.

The ShopALot was busier than she’d anticipated, but then again, it was a Friday. Sarah found a shady spot at the extreme end of the lot (reserved for lepers and vans) and walked across the baking asphalt into the blessed air-conditioned interior of the store. Handling the credit card made her nervous at first (fifteen hundred dollars was more money than she’d ever spent in single day, unless she was putting down the first and last month deposit on an apartment, and sometimes not even then), but it wasn’t long before she began to relax and even to enjoy herself. While parking her third full cart at the front of the store to await checkout, Sarah discovered what hardly needed discovering: It was fun to spend other people’s money.

Five hours later, list completely checked off and credit card emptied, Sarah drove herself and her sore feet home with a root beer (purchased with her own dollar, thank you very much, Ms. Heinrich), humming. She had not forgotten the misery of the morning, but she was trying to put it into perspective. It was hardly the worst day she’d had at Cottonwood; that dubious honor still went to the day she fell into the ditch and then had to take Samaritan’s crude comments about it. For that matter, it wouldn’t be the last bad day she had at work either. Surprise! Cottonwood was a horrible place, but just because she had to work there physically didn’t mean she had to live there emotionally.

Maybe she’d throw that party after all. She could invite the entire social services department; someone was bound to show up. Maybe she’d even make a few friends. How hard could that be? She was young and single and blondes were supposed to be fun. Maybe she could even—

Sarah stopped humming. Her hands squeaked on the steering wheel as her grip reflexively tightened. At the very next wide point in the road, she pulled over and braked hard, not unmindful of the heavy load of party supplies filling up the van, but not caring a lot about them either. She bent between the seats, fumbling through burger wrappers and old gas receipts as highway traffic whipped by on her left side. She’d had an idea and it took her as entirely as if she’d had a heart attack instead, but she didn’t have a single coherent thought in her head until she found the Application for Recreational Funding and read it. All of it. Especially the fine print.

When she was done reading, she pressed the papers down over the steering wheel and just thought for a while. She hummed now and then in toneless spurts, unaware she did it. Then she tucked the application up under the sunvisor and got back on the road. She had Ms. Heinrich’s party stuff to deliver and the rest of this day to get through, but after that, she had the whole weekend to plan her party.

And it was going to be a big one.

* * *

Monday morning, as Sarah hunched over her coffee-maker swearing and smacking at it in an futile effort to get a caramel macchiato before the year 2045, a white IBI van pulled up in her driveway. And even though she hadn’t turned the papers in yet or even told anyone about them—not Kate, not even Fagin!—when Sarah saw the driver’s door open and the man get out, she knew—not thought or guessed or dreaded, but knew—she was about to be arrested. Or whatever IBI did with dissidents. She straightened up slowly and watched through the wispy curtains as the head and shoulders of a very large man passed in front of her kitchen window, heading in the direction of her door. A moment later, the knock: bang-bang, loud and authoritative.

Fagin roused himself for a sleepy bark, then looked at Sarah to see if that was enough or if he had to get off the couch and do it again. God, what was going to happen to her dog if they took her away? Would they give her a phone call? Maybe she should call Kate now…

Sarah took a breath and walked on numb legs through the living room. She opened the door.

The man was getting back into his van. He waved at her. At her feet, on the fuzzy black mat with IBI welcomes You! written on it was a cardboard box with Kate’s name and address in the upper left corner. Sarah studied it without comprehension, then lifted her eyes to watch the van drive away. Above the IBI logo on each of its rear windows were stickers. One advised tailgaters that ‘this van makes frequent stops’. The other declared itself the property of the IBI mail delivery system.

In the kitchen, the Konaluv beeped and spat coffee into the recess where her mug ought to be.

Sarah looked down at the mug in her hand, sighed, then picked up her package and took it into the house. It was a big box, plain brown cardboard, of the sort one snatches out of the back of restaurants to pack clothes or dishes in. This one had been slightly water damaged in the long-ago, but was still sturdy. Whatever was in it was relatively light, less than fifteen pounds altogether, she’d guess. The contents shifted some as she carried it, suggesting many components, but the little sounds they made were not helpful in identifying them. Sarah studied it as she mopped up her macchiato, then unplugged the stupid Konaluv to keep it from spitting out another one and went to open it.

She knew what she had the instant she saw what was inside. And tucked on top of all the newspaper-wrapped treasures was a single sheet of paper marked by her big sister’s broad, loopy handwriting: Sorry I was so bitchy on the phone. I miss you bucketfuls. Found this while cleaning out my closets and thought you might like to have it. Please please please be safe. Love, Katie.

Sarah did not especially believe in God, but there were moments in her life when she flirted with the idea of signs and omens and this, she was certain, was one of them. Or if it wasn’t, at least it was an excuse to get a second opinion on The Plan from the one person she knew she could trust to tell about it.

The box went into the way-back of the van, behind the rear seat where it was hidden. She drove to Checkpoint Seventeen, was flagged down briefly so that the day guard could come out and harass her, but it was a different guy and he only stuck his head in and said, “Driving today?”

“It’s too hot to walk,” she said, trying not to even think of the box, in case he could see it reflected in her eyes. She hated lying, but Kate was right: She could get away with it just an incredible amount of the time.

“It’s August. It’ll get worse before it gets better.”

“Then you’ll see me driving more often,” she said, and smiled.

Politeness always seemed to throw these people, she’d noticed that before. The guard reared back, blinking at her, then offered an extremely grudging smile of his own and waved her through. “Keep your doors and windows locked,” he called as she swiped her card. “The bugs will take anything that ain’t nailed down and pry up anything that is! Security is extension 99 on your paz! Do not wait to get swarmed before you page me!”

“Thank you!” she called, and drove off down the causeway as unseen aliens put out the alert that she was here. If she saw one peek out from an alley or the top of one of their makeshift houses, she waved. One of them spat at the van, but otherwise no one reacted, which was actually something of an improvement.

She got some work done, because that was what people who were not involved in shady plots did, and also because she still had a lot of census reports to take. She didn’t get many—even at this early hour, most of her clients were either not at home or pretending not to be—but she did get a few, and Baccus even came to his door when she knocked, although he didn’t open it. He assured her he was all right, that he was healthy and he did not need a doctor, and then he begged her in his whispering way to please leave him alone, so she did. Turning away from his door to see T’aki waiting at the end of the road with his tin cans and trucks was like coming out of the rain into sunlight. She waved, walking to the van as he jumped up and down and waved back.

“That’s favoritism,” Samaritan remarked when she slid in behind the wheel.

Sarah screamed, throwing herself back against the seat, and the alien in her rearview mirror laughed that scuttling laugh.

“You should really keep your doors locked,” he suggested, and looked around. “This isn’t an IBI van.”

“It’s mine,” she managed to gasp, still grabbing the shirt over her pounding heart. “Mr. Samaritan, what are you doing in my car?”

“Just relaxing. I don’t go for a lot of rides. So. What is it with you and Sanford? You don’t see me every day.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Let me rephrase that. You don’t want to see me.” He chuckled, then slid off the back seat and came forward on all fours, until he was right behind her. He reached up, long black fingers toying with her hair. “But you go singing off down the road every single day just hoping to see Sanford. I’m jealous.”

“He’s got a cute kid.” What was he doing back there?

“Yes, he does, doesn’t he?” His fingers kept stroking, lightly tugging now and then, moving with unhurried intent over her head.

He was braiding her hair. For some reason, this was the creepiest thing he’d done yet. Sarah sat frozen, her scalp crawling, unable to think how to stop him.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard a human refer to one of our children as cute before,” he remarked, utterly absorbed in what his fingers did. “Have you ever seen an egg?”

“N-no.”

“Relax, relax. You’re always so nervous. No, humans don’t tend to think eggs are cute, do they? They even eat chicken eggs, which I don’t mind telling you is kind of disgusting when you stop and think about it. On a number of levels.” He finished with her hair and draped it over her shoulder, then looked at her reflection in the mirror. “But you think Sanford’s boy is cute.”

She nodded.

“They were sure pissed when he had him. They came by a few days after the kid was licensed and tried to take him away. Said the conditions were unsafe.”

His eyes in the rearview mirror invited comment. Sarah said nothing.

“Sanford can be pretty bad-ass when he wants to be, don’t let that cool exterior fool you. And by the way, what do you think of the conditions here, caseworker?”

“Of course they’re unsafe,” she said. “They’re unsafe for anyone. That’s why we have to fix the conditions, not take away people’s children.”

“You sound like one of those humans on TV with all their chatter about the best way to manage us. And yet we’re still so dangerous. Even the cute ones.” Samaritan leaned in a little closer and drummed his palps lightly against the back of her now-bared neck. He laughed again when she shuddered, but backed away. “Tell me the truth, are you just using the kid to get a little closer to his dad? Is that it, caseworker? You curious about the chitin?”

“Would you please get out of my car?”

“It’s nice in here. But it’s funny that you only have the two seats up front and the long bench in back…with all this space in the middle…and a blanket.” He picked up one corner of Fagin’s traveling quilt and put it down again. He looked at her. “Why don’t you come in back with me?”

“Get out of my car!”

“It’ll be a little cramped, but we can make it work.”

“I know you’re not serious, now get out!”

His eyes blinked once, cat-like. “What makes you think I’m not serious?”

‘Because you’re an unisexual drone!’ she wanted to shout, but something in his smug, knowing stare stopped her.

“You are so much fun,” he said, and opened up the side door. He got out, straightened with a brisk shake, and slammed it, waggling his fingers at her through the window.

“Asshole,” she muttered, and pulled her hair loose again with hands that only shook a little. T’aki was still waiting, and now the door behind him was also open, an invitation to the slightly cooler interior of Sanford’s home. She left Samaritan behind her on the causeway and drove the last hundred meters or so to her ultimate destination. This time, she locked the doors.

“Blue van!” T’aki cheered as she got out, and came running over to climb onto the van’s hood and slap his palms over its ticking engine. “Is that the good kind?”

“I like it.” She picked him off the hot hood and set him on the ground again. “Don’t run off anywhere, jellybean. I found something of yours.”

He stopped bouncing and cocked his head at her. “Of mine? Where?”

“Out here somewhere,” she said, going around to the back. She heard the scrape of Sanford’s stool and saw him come to the door.

T’aki turned around and wrung his hands a little as he looked back and forth from each one of his tin cans to the half a milk jug in their center. “I didn’t lose anything,” he said. And when he saw the box come out of the van, his tiny face became quite solemn. “That isn’t mine. It belongs to someone else.”

“Honey…” Sarah hipchecked the van doors shut and came to set the box down on the hood. She hunkered down to get more or less on the boy’s level, and smiled for him. “I have a lot of rules that I have to follow if I want to work here, you know that, right? Like, I have to come only during certain hours, and I’m not allowed to talk about certain things, and mostly, I’m not allowed to bring stuff in or take stuff out unless I have specific permission to do so, even if I really want to.”

“Yes?”

“So I can’t give you things,” she said slowly, meaningfully. “But if I find things inside Cottonwood, it’s okay for me to return them to you.”

T’aki’s eyes slowly narrowed as he leaned forward, the very picture of intense concentration. “Is it…a lie?”

Sarah sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Yes, honey. It is a lie.”

He looked up at the box and wrung his hands again. “Where did you really find it?”

“In my house. Please open it.”

“Inside,” said Sanford, clicking hard as he looked down the empty causeway. He took the box, held the door for the two of them (still staring outside), then shut them all away in privacy. Only then did he look at it, moving his fingers slightly to inspect the mailing address and the faint blue lettering stamped beneath it. “You should not have done this,” he said, setting it down at last before his hopping, excited son.

“I’m aware of that, but in the great scheme of things, it didn’t seem like a lot of risk. I didn’t smuggle in uranium or anything.” She dropped into Sanford’s green vinyl chair and watched T’aki clamber head-first through the cardboard flaps, crumpled newspaper flying as he unwrapped the first item.

His kicking feet stilled. A low, groaning sort of rattling breath came out of the box. Sarah checked with Sanford to see if it was a good sound, and therefore missed the moment that T’aki dropped back onto the floor, holding her giant rubber iguana in both hands over his head like the Holy Grail. He made it squeak. The eyes bugged. Sanford’s head cocked, his antennae spiking upwards. T’aki squealed and dove back into the box.

A sparkly frisbee, a couple glittery rubber balls that lit up on the good bounces, her remote-controlled tarantula (“That may not have any batteries,” she said. “I have spares,” Sanford replied, still watching his son), a squirt gun in the shape of an elephant, her Spiderman webslingers, a whole row of Easter chicks that peeped if you held them in your hand, a huge can of Legos, three of the six officially licensed PlantGirlz 12” action figures, her dolphin lava lamp, and—

“Oh my gosh!” Sarah laughed, delighted. “The Fortesque Freeship! I forgot I even had that!”

T’aki, by this time standing chest-deep in wadded newspapers inside the otherwise empty box, looked at her and then at the clunky plastic ship in his hands. “What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a toy spaceship. Actually, I think it’s the ship from Scylla Six, but it always reminded me a little of the one Fortesque used in Invasion of the Asteroid Men, so when I saw it at the thrift store, I basically promised my mom my life’s blood if she’d buy it for me.”

“Spaceship,” T’aki echoed softly, his eyes huge. He touched the tiny plastic window. “It flies.”

“Only in pretend. I used to have a little Creature from the Black Lagoon inside it for a pilot, but one time Kate got really cheesed at me for something and popped the head off, so I threw it out.” She watched him make a practice swoop and laughed quietly to herself. “It didn’t occur to me until much later that a headless monster in a spaceship was right up Fortesque’s alley.”

“Can I keep this one?” T’aki asked, bouncing in the box with the ship clutched to his chest. “Please! Please please please please!”

“Honey, you can keep them all.”

Sanford looked at her.

“I guess anything you don’t particularly want, you can give to someone else. Or, you know, whatever.” She picked up Iggy and squeaked him, smiling. She tried not to wonder how many cans of rotten roadkill he was worth.

“What is Fortesque?” T’aki asked, struggling his way out of the box in a drift of newspaper and still trying to keep his ship in the air, flying.

“Fortesque was Charles M. Fortesque. He was an Englishman who came to America back in the seventies to learn how to make serious movies, and then went to Italy and made a lot of science-fiction ones instead.” She paused. “Movies are—”

“I know. Picture-stories for pretend.” Swish-swish went the ship, and then T’aki looked at her brightly. “Sometimes Father takes me to see movies after the Heaps.”

“My Dad used to take me to movies too. And Fortesque’s were the best. They were just awful.” And she laughed. “I loved them.”

Father and son glanced at each other.

“Yeah, I know that needs some explaining. Fortesque made movies with a little money, a lot of creative freedom, and this glorious excess of enthusiasm that made the most ridiculous things fun to watch, regardless of how bad you knew the movie really was. I know, I know. I have to give you an example.” She thought about it, and laughed. “Okay, first Fortesque I ever saw was Killer Sludge from Dimension X. I don’t expect you to know this, but even the title is terrible and hilarious. Okay, so the sludge is actually a thin layer of latex spread out over an ottoman with some air bladders built in and a lot of dish soap to make it shiny, so even at the very start, it is about the least menacing thing you can possibly imagine. It spends about ninety minutes creeping around, blowing bubbles and apparently killing people off-screen, although I was never able to figure out how. I don’t know, maybe it had a gun.

“Anyway, there’s a scene where the hero and the heroine are in their living room talking about how to destroy it, and while they’re talking, the sludge suddenly creeps in from the kitchen and comes towards them. In any other movie,” said Sarah into T’aki’s wide-eyed and fascinated face, “this would be an intensely dramatic moment. The kids are completely wrapped up in each other, the sludge is ominous and out-of-focus, just coming and coming…and coming…” She waited. “And coming…”

T’aki giggled.

“I timed it once. The scene takes five minutes and fifteen seconds before the sludge finally rears up behind the couch and the kids see it. And the living room is not that big, so yeah, it takes five minutes and fifteen seconds to creep along at most twenty-five feet. Let me break that down for you, jellybean. Your dad’s work table is about five feet long. I’m going to set my timer—” She fished out her paz and flipped the stopwatch app on. “—for one minute and three seconds, and you try to walk from one side to the other and not get there before it beeps.”

T’aki took her paz without relinquishing the ship. Head down, eyes fixed on the screen, he started walking.

Sanford was still watching her.

“Slow it down, jellybean,” she advised, grinning.

“I can’t!” And laughed himself. “This is slow!”

“It really is. By my calculations, when the sludge finally does rear up to blow bubbles at them, the kids should have had time to get up, walk around the couch to the kitchen table, sit down, and finish their conversation. Instead, they run screaming out of the house, get in the car, drive ninety miles an hour across two towns to the observatory, run up to the magnescope, and there’s the sludge, and all I could think was, ‘What, did he catch a cab?’ That’s Charles M. Fortesque. I loved those movies!”

“Tell me another one!” T’aki said, leaping up onto the arm of the chair beside her.

“Well…” Sarah looked at his father, dimly aware that not everyone in the world was entertained by having some zealot recount old movie-plots, but he merely turned around and went quietly back to work on whatever he was fixing today. That left her with T’aki, bouncing in place and staring at her with his pleading, pale eyes and his brand-new spaceship. “Okay,” she said. “One more. My favorite Fortesque of all time: Aliens From Outer Space.”

T’aki chirped loudly and drew up his legs, all attention.

“Okay, so one fine evening, a spaceship comes to Earth and starts sucking people up in beams of light. Where the aliens come from is never explained. Why they are abducting people is never explained. What happens to all the people they have abducted, with the exception of our plucky heroine—”

“Is never explained,” T’aki said.

“You’re starting to get the hang of a Fortesque flick. So okay, our heroine is a simply amazing young actress who plays a physicist who is abducted out of her laboratory and wakes to find herself aboard the alien craft in a wooden cage. Now,” began Sarah, warming to the tale. “Far be it for me to wonder why a civilization advanced enough to master interstellar flight can’t build a decent holding cell, but in addition to having a wooden cage, the bars are clearly wide enough for our heroine to climb out through. I mean, clearly.”

“Does she?”

“Clearly not,” murmured Sanford.

“No, she doesn’t. She decides she’s trapped and spends several minutes looking very distressed while pulling on bars that are actually further apart than her shoulders. And then the door opens and in comes our first alien, who is in fact a giant starfish with an eye in his stomach. Our heroine takes two seconds to ponder this—one, two—and goes strutting over to seduce the starfish—er…” she amended, suddenly remembering she was talking to a three year-old. “To make him think she’s his friend so he’ll let her out of the cage.”

“That isn’t very nice,” said T’aki solemnly.

“No, but neither is abducting people off their planet, so I guess it evens out. The thing that always got me, however, is the speed with which she came up with this plan. I’m sorry, but if you can come to terms with the idea of seducing a giant starfish in just two seconds, this has to be a notion you’ve pondered long before you ever met one.”

Sanford made a noise, a kind of rattling cough. She paused expectantly, but he kept his back to her and his hands at work.

“Did she get out?” T’aki asked.

“Yes, she did, thanks to the starfish and the extremely liberal Italian censorship restrictions on film. Then off she runs in her underwear through a ship that looked, when it was on Earth, about the size of a schooner, but which is big enough on the inside not only to support an entire civilization of different aliens, but to have its own climate. She actually comes to one room that has a jungle in it. My dad and I once had a ripping good discussion trying to figure out the jungle,” Sarah recalled, smiling. “I argued that it was useful for producing oxygen.”

“There are far more efficient ways,” Sanford remarked.

“Which is what my dad said, but if they used machines, where would they get the wood to build their cages? See, the fun of watching Fortesque’s movies isn’t finding the holes, it’s patching them. Or at least admiring them. It takes real talent to be that bad.”

T’aki laughed, drumming his feet on the arm of the chair. “Bad is good.”

“Sometimes. But back to our heroine, who, after seventy minutes of various shenanigans, has made it to the command deck, where she finds that all the controls for operating the entire ship are neatly contained not just in one place, but in one device. And it’s a bathtub.”

“A bathtub?”

“A bathtub. Oh, it’s a nice bathtub,” she admitted, smiling dreamily into space. “And Fortesque went to great lengths to disguise the shower head with lights and the spigot with futurific plastic panels, but it is blatantly a bathtub. And while our heroine is trying to figure out whether the ship’s engines run on hot or cold running water, in from the shadows comes the king of the aliens. Remember the scene with the kids on the couch and the killer sludge?”

T’aki nodded, giggling.

“Same scene. The king comes gliding forward in a single sustained shot for four and a half minutes, which is plenty of time for you, the viewer, to be bored out of your skull, and also to see that the king is—” Sarah hesitated, looking around the room. She pointed. “See that magazine, honey? Can you hand it to me?”

Before T’aki could hop down, Sanford stretched across to the indicated shelf and passed her the mangled Cosmopolitan. He didn’t look to see what she did with it, but just went back to work.

Some of the pages were ripped out, presumably for Sanford to use as writing material, but it wasn’t long before Sarah found what she wanted. “There’s the alien king,” she said, pointing. “Otherwise known as a common household floor lamp.”

T’aki stared at it, clicking and purring, delighted.

“They painted up the glass globe to look like a giant eyeball, and wrapped the rod with pipe cleaners or something to make it look fuzzy, but yeah, it was a still very obviously a lamp, and there were three different shots where you could see the cord trailing behind the little dolly or whatever they had it standing on so they could roll it evilly around. First time I saw it, I actually fell off the couch laughing.”

She passed the magazine back to Sanford. He took it without comment, glanced once at the photograph, and continued to work.

“Now after four and a half minutes of failing to operate a faucet, our heroine looks up and sees the king. She takes two seconds to ponder this—”

“One, two,” chanted T’aki.

“—and struts over to seduce the king, and this is the sheer brilliance of Fortesque’s movies, because while the ideas are bad and the writing is bad and the effects are bad, the casting is phenomenally good. Our heroine is able not only to hipshot her way over to a household appliance while staring smolderingly into its eye, she puts her hand up on this glass globe, which as I’ve said has been burning with at least a hundred-watt bulb in a continuous shot for four and a half minutes, and never loses an ounce of her panther-like heat and intensity, in spite of the fact that her hand audibly sizzles on contact. That is an amazing actress, and that is one of only two things I can ever think while watching that scene.”

“What’s the other think?” T’aki asked.

“To wonder why the king’s first words are, ‘So, you think to throw yourself upon my mercy,’ and not, ‘Ouch, bitch, my eye!’“

Sanford erupted in laughter. Both hands slammed down on the table; he rocked back, spraying the strange mix of rattles and broken whoops straight up at the ceiling. Sarah and T’aki both jumped, but he recovered first, joining his father in peals of giggles while she just sat and blushed.

“Bitch is actually a vulgar word,” she admitted. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention to myself.”

Sanford flapped a hand at her, still laughing. He picked up his tools, wound himself down to chuckles, and got back to work.

“Fortesque’s movies were the best, but they were twenty years old by the time I even discovered them so they’re hard to find. They don’t even play them on TV anymore. I had a bunch on tape and they released a few on DVD, but the bottom dropped out of the sci-fi movie market when your ship showed up.”

“Can you bring some?” T’aki asked. “Father can fix a media player! I want to see the Fortesque!”

“Sorry, jellybean, but I had to sell my collection a few years ago when things got tight. I hated to do it, but I needed the money.” She sighed, playing with the wing of the Freeship. “I’d give anything to see one again. Especially that one. It was my all-time favorite.”

“Mine, too.” T’aki climbed down, swooped his ship, then looked hopefully at his father. “Outside and play?”

“Stay close.”

And off he went, ship raised high and idling like a truck.

In his absence, the room became a lot smaller.

“I hope I didn’t bore you too badly,” she said at last.

“No.”

Silence.

He clicked quietly to himself, one hand moving absently over whatever it was he had laid out on the table, not working now, but only picking at it. “These are your own possessions.”

“It’s been a long time since I played with toys.”

“All the same, I thank you.” He glanced at the window and through it, watching the Fortesque Freeship swoop by, clutched in T’aki’s small hand. “But I am not entirely comfortable accepting gifts from you.”

“Oh.” Sarah looked down at her briefcase, somewhat thrown by this unforeseen development. “That’s too bad, because there was kind of something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

Reserve locked back into his eyes. He turned around on the stool to face her fully, one hand on the table, the other curled at his thigh, wary.

Suddenly nervous, Sarah pulled her case onto her lap and opened it, searching inside. “The situation here is…is bad and I wish I could tell you that I could change it. I want you know that I know what you’re going through. I don’t mean to say that I know, because obviously I go home and you…but I know. I see it, I guess is what I’m trying to say. I know it’s…wrong.”

He waited, watching her shuffle paper, not making a sound.

“I’m not ignoring it,” she said. Her voice seemed too loud, too insistent. She bit at her lip, staring into her briefcase until black letters and white papers blurred out into so many nonsensical stripes. “But I can’t stop it. If I thought I could, I’d try. I hope you believe that. I know that if I could just get pictures out, if I could make the world see this place, people would stop it, but I have this non-disclosure agreement.”

The excuse—and that was just what it was, and a whiny, feeble one at that—hung uncontested in the air, daring her to say it again.

“Every time I go through the gate, I’m scanned for electronics. My paz is the only thing allowed through, because it’s keyed to their system, but that’s just it. It’s keyed to their system. If I use it to take pictures or even try to post something online, they know and they can stop it before anyone else sees it. Even if I miraculously got something out, my ISP number is attached to everything, so they’d know it was me who did it. Maybe someone who knew about this stuff could get around that, but I just don’t know how. I want to help you, but it’s just…It’s complicated.”

He was still waiting.

“So as much as I’d like to tell you that I can make them stop dumping trash in here, I can’t. I don’t even think I can make them clean up this causeway and I’m afraid that if I push them too hard—”

“I understand,” Sanford said, without discernible emotion. “All you could possibly accomplish is to make them notice you.”

She picked up the papers she wanted, closed her briefcase, and set them on its surface, pressing them in place as if to keep them from slipping away. “But I think there’s a way I can get them to give you something without them noticing, as long as they think they’re really giving it to me.”

“A propane oven?” he guessed, his eyes narrowing.

“I was thinking a bit bigger than that.” She passed her papers over to him. “I want to throw a party.”

The plates above his eyes expanded slightly.

“A block party,” she went on. “I mean, IBI throws parties all the time and I just happened to get one of these applications so I can throw one of my own and let IBI pay for it. I read over the rules at least ten times, and I’m pretty sure it’s legal…kind of the same way it used to be technically legal to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, right up until some bone-head did. It’s what we call a loophole.”

“An omission of law,” he said, and looked at the papers. He read them in silence: her three-page itemized list of everything she was ready to requisition. The gravity of his expression killed what little excitement she’d had for the plan, which she’d spent all weekend researching and was really quite proud of. After he’d finished with the last page, he picked them all up and stared at them some more. “Explain.”

“First, I have to tell them what kind of event I’m having and how many people I want to invite. I wrote I wanted to have an outdoor social event for my clients…only I kind of spread it out so I had an excuse to squeeze the ‘client’ part in sort of small and sloppy,” she admitted.

“Sort of,” Sanford echoed. She wasn’t imagining the disapproval in his clicks; T’aki opened the door and peeked in, confused but ready to be contrite, and was dismissed again with a soft rumble of sound. Then Sanford looked at her again. “With this paper, you think you can steal extra food chits for all of us?”

“It’s not stealing and no, not all of you. I’m sorry. If I have to justify myself, I have to have a plausible reason for my answers. I only have two hundred and thirty-six clients, so that’s how many people I invited to the party. But I’m hoping…Okay, here’s how it works. First, I tell them how many people are coming. Then I figure out how much food I’m going to need, assuming each person at the party gets one burger and two drinks. Then I requisition any non-food items necessary for the event, like plates and coolers and stuff. Next, I need to provide three estimates for everything I want them to buy, which I took from, like, JC Foods, Cook Nook, places like that.” She broke off, blushing as she realized he wouldn’t have any way of knowing what a ‘place like that’ meant, but Sanford merely looked at her. “The point is,” she said hurriedly, “they’re all ridiculously overpriced, but if I get approved, I don’t actually have to shop at those places. All I have to do is justify the cost and they give me a pre-paid credit card that I can take anywhere, even to the ShopALot, where chicken is only 99 cents a pound. So I can actually get two or maybe three times the food for what they’d charge at JC Foods.”

“I think I understand,” he said slowly. “You aren’t giving us chits. You’re giving us food.” He leaned back onto his work table, rubbing at the soft part of his throat with a dark and brooding expression.

“Also, for everything I don’t actually have to buy, I can use that money for more food too. Like the tubs for carrying stuff—I have six of those already. I can just bring mine and there’s another thirty bucks for food. If they pull double-duty as coolers for the drinks—” She shrugged. “—another twenty bucks.”

“You say this isn’t stealing?”

“It isn’t. Technically. But it’s definitely sneaky and dishonest, and yes, they will be upset if they catch me, and there’s a very good chance they will, but hopefully not until after it’s all over.”

She waited. He said nothing.

“So that’s my plan,” she said finally. “What do you think?”

His glance spoke volumes, but he said merely, “Are you asking for my help?”

“I’d like to,” she said. “For the tables. I figure we’re going to need at least five or maybe even ten, and I know you don’t have a lot of spare tables lying around, but if you can come up with them, then I don’t have to buy them, and that’s a lot more money for food.”

He clicked, softly at first, and then loudly, until T’aki rattled out an answer from outside. He shuffled through the papers one last time and passed them back to her. “How much time will I have?”

“At least a week. Maybe two. And as soon as I get the money, we’re doing it. There’ll be no hiding it once we start cooking, but by then it’ll be too late to stop us.”

He gave her a look, one that was weirdly familiar—Kate’s faintly pitying stare—and then looked out the window again. “How many will you feed with this…”

“Block party. I can only ask for enough to take care of my own clients, but I think if I’m sneaky enough, I can do more. Maybe even double.”

“How many?” he asked, still speaking in that same serious, low voice, as if they were planning to blow up IBI Headquarters. His gaze remained steady; his eyes, troubled.

“Three hundred, easily,” she said. “Four, with effort. But I’m hoping for five.”

He looked away, out the narrow window, and took a few deep breaths. He said nothing.

Her confidence, none too strong to begin with, began to splinter. She shored it up as best she could with a little laugh, saying, “Of course, if I’m wrong about the sleeping dogs in the accounting department, none of this will happen at all.”

Sanford did not react.

“So…So my plan comes to just over two thousand dollars, which sounds like a lot of money, but they’re throwing a lot of parties out there right now, so it shouldn’t set off any alarms. In fact, asking for less than that might. Do you…” Her nerve, such as it was, failed completely at last. “What do you think?” she asked again.

Sanford glanced at her and looked away again. He reached down, picked up one of the discarded PlantGirlz from the floor—Marigold—looked at her, and put her back in the box. “I think you don’t have much experience with planning things.”

“Well, no, but—”

“I believe that you want to help,” he interrupted quietly. “But you don’t need to kill yourself proving it.”

“They’re not going to kill me. After all, I’m not stealing anything. I’m going to go through all the proper channels. If they figure out what I’m planning, they’ll reject my application and they’ll probably chew me out a bit, but Sanford, what’s the good of my position if I don’t use it to help people? You deserve someone who can actually make things right, but…but you’ve got me. And this is all I can think of to do.”

He clicked, rubbed at the plates between his eyes, and finally said, “Have you spoken of this plan to anyone else? Your kind or mine?”

“No.”

“Good. Don’t. I’ll manage the arrangements inside Cottonwood.” And he blew air quietly through his palps and rubbed even harder between his eyes, muttering, “This is a terrible, terrible idea.”

Sarah tucked her papers back in her case, found her paz on the table where T’aki had left it, and stood up. “I should go,” she said, frowning at the clock app. “Before someone else notices how much time I spend here.”

His gaze sharpened. “Someone else?”

“Oh.” She shrugged, moving to open the door. “Mr. Samaritan made some smartass comments.”

His antennae lowered. “Yes. He does that.”

She hesitated again and looked back at him. “Does it bother you that I come so often?”

It disturbed her that he had to think about it.

“No,” he said slowly. And after another pause, “My son seems to like you.”

“Well, I like him too.” She smiled. “And you.”

He looked at her.

Okay, that was awkward.

“So, thank you. About the tables. And I’ll let you know what happens, but for right now, just kind of plan for five hundred people in about fourteen days, okay?”

“Yes.”

She let herself out, said goodbye to T’aki, who was flying circles around the house with his ship over his head, and climbed up into the van. Not a bad day. Two more reports taken, toys delivered, and block party planned. Despite Sanford’s obvious doubts, she was beginning to feel encouraged again.

* * *

Sanford began with the ones he knew in the market, the ones he knew could spare the materials and could keep the reason secret, but he expected no promises from any of them and received none. None of them knew Sarah; their experiences with their own caseworkers clearly left them skeptical of her motives. He had more success once he’d returned to Section Seventeen, where Sarah was a familiar sight (and sound), and even better among his more trustworthy neighbors on the causeway. It was a lot to ask for in so short a length of time, particularly for something that might not happen, but, as he pointed out, if it all turned to smoke, they’d still have a table they could sell.

“She can use this one for the day,” Byrnes said, running a dubious eye over the plastic monolith in his living space. “As long as I get it back.”

“I think it very likely IBI will come and destroy everything. She seems to think she can stand them off—”

“Yes, I’ve met her. Idiot.” Byrnes rubbed at his throat and hissed to himself, thinking. “Go ahead, then. Mark me down for a table. I’ve got two or three people I can talk to deeper in the rows if you need more, but they’re going to want a place at the feast. How many people does she think she’s going to feed?”

“She plans for three hundred, hopes for five.”

“Ko’vi protect us, that many.” Another hiss, longer this time. Byrnes stood up and paced his small house. “We’ll need sentries posted. IBI will be the least of our worries when word of this gets out.”

“I know. Keep it quiet while you can.” Sanford stood to go. “It might not happen.”

“Oh, I think it will,” Byrnes said distractedly, still pacing. “She’s got that look. But she’s still an idiot and those other humans are going to eat her alive when they find out. Us too, maybe.”

“I could dissuade her, I think. She’ll listen to me.” And it was true, which was a puzzling thing in itself. She had walked up to him for the first time on the first day preparing to trust him. It alarmed him, but made him feel oddly protective of her as well.

“No. That much meat, when half of us are hunting Heap-rats and the other half too slow to catch them, that’s worth a little risk. Besides, they’re killing us anyway. At least it’s a chance we won’t die hungry.” Byrnes flicked his antennae in a show of humor, and immediately belied the sentiment with, “Tell her not to fight, if it comes to that. Don’t give them a reason to come after her.”

Good advice. It was what every yang’ti lived by, and see how well they were doing.

Sanford returned home to his son (little ear and big mouth, like all small boys, and this was talk that needed to be secret), opened his door, and found Sam perched on the green chair, picking through the box of children’s toys.

His first reaction was not a charitable one. He clicked hard; T’aki answered from the corner behind him. The boy sat quiet, apprehensive, clutching his new ship as though he feared it would be taken away, which, given the company, was not an unwarranted thought.

“My feelings are hurt,” said Sam. “You’ve been out in the rows for hours and never came to see me. And what’s this I hear about a feast?”

“Go outside,” Sanford snapped, and T’aki went out at a run. As soon as he was gone, Sanford gave his foot a very visible flex and stamp on his worn carpet and quietly said, “Miserable as it is, this is still my house. I don’t appreciate being invaded.”

“The door was unlocked.” Unperturbed, Sam picked up one of the human dolls—the one with yellow hair and mostly naked limbs—and chirred at it suggestively. “You don’t mind when it’s the caseworker stopping by.”

“She knocks.”

Sam reached out and tapped the doll’s head on the table.

Sanford snatched it away and threw it back in the box. “What do you want?”

“I think a better question is, what does she want? And even better, why do you believe her? You honestly can’t imagine why the humans might want us all swarming in one place? Master military strategist like you?”

“This is why I didn’t ask you for help.”

“Oh, I never said I wouldn’t help,” Sam said airily. “I love to help. Particularly our yellow-haired hummer. Tell the truth. It’s not really just the kid who likes to see her, is it?” And he chirred again, his claspers extending to taste the air.

“Get out of my house,” Sanford said, disgusted.

Sam laughed at him and shook his head. “Whatever. Is my gun ready?”

“I’ll bring it tonight. Now get out!”

“Fine. I’ll put a sheep-leg on.” Sam stood up and lazily stretched as Sanford waited by the open door. He knew the effect he was having and clearly enjoyed it. “She likes to sit in that chair, doesn’t she?”

“What?”

Sam flicked a hand at the green chair he had just vacated, then flashed his claspers again. “She doesn’t know it, but she’s scent-marking. You hadn’t noticed?” Now he extended his claspers fully, brushing them back and forth over the seat of the chair. He chirred, eyes rolling back and antennae quivering. “God, that’s nice. I don’t mind telling you, I’d love to push her down some night and get inside that.”

Sanford gaped, then banged his fist on the open door and shouted, “Get out!”

But as Sam went smugly by, some unreasoning part of him made him lash out and catch Sam by the throat, under the palps where he could feel each breath pumping below the soft, unprotected skin. Sam was the larger male, and far more aggressive, but Sanford had been a soldier in the time Before and he knew how to make a grip work. In seconds, he’d shoved the other man down on his knees.

“I don’t care what you did in the other camps,” he said. “But on this road, in front of my house, you keep yourself behaved. Do not provoke the IBI. That means you stay away from the caseworker.” He flexed his hand on Sam’s throat and leaned down a little. “And the next time I open my door and see you in my home uninvited, I will take you for a thief and a stranger and break you open, do you hear me?”

“Perfectly.”

Sanford opened his hand. Sam staggered to his feet, stepped outside, and dropped again to spray bile—a delayed reaction to one of those good soldierly grips. Sanford watched coldly from the doorway, ready to fight if it came to that.

It didn’t. Sam got up again, kicked dirt over the damp patch, and walked off. “She’s my caseworker too,” he called. “I’ll do what I damn well please.”

“Father?”

“Come inside now.” Sanford waited, watching until Sam was tucked up in his own house, before backing indoors and shutting the light away. Push her down and get inside that. He felt like spitting.

But the ship in his son’s hands caught his eye. How she’d sat, telling stories and laughing as though she sat with friends. She talked of being a girl…he’d never thought of humans as ever being children, although of course he’d seen pictures, he knew they didn’t drop down whole from the sky. She talked of her father, her family. And when T’aki was gone, then out came her plans, her little courage, her guileless trust in him.

‘She’s dangerous,’ he thought suddenly. ‘She’s dangerous because you don’t see her as human. She could use that against you.’

But she wouldn’t.

‘You can’t afford to believe that.’

She was honest.

‘She’s one of the IBI.’

But she was trying to help.

He listened, but not even the black voice of caution could argue that.

“Father?”

T’aki had climbed up on the chair, on just the arm, as though Sarah were sitting in it even now. Sanford picked him up and held him, him and his ship both, and looked out the window at the empty road.

“Does our ship look like this?” T’aki asked.

“No, of course not. You’ve seen pictures of the ship.” He glanced at the toy. “Perhaps a little.”

“Can I call it anything I want?”

“It belongs to you now.”

The boy thought, his little fingers stroking over the plastic wings. “The Fortesque Freeship is a good name.”

“Yes, it is,” said Sanford, unsurprised.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sarah swiped her card at the gate and walked in, wishing she’d brought the van. It was stupid to drive the garbage-choked causeway of Section Seventeen just for a few minutes of air-conditioning in-between clients, but ugh, the heat was just an animal today. Her native co-workers assured her that it would start cooling off in September, but then it would also start to rain every day, and in addition to the new and improved smell that would create, she’d also be walking this road ankle-deep in trash-water. After that, it would be October and icing over. Then November, when the mercury might start dipping into single digits and possibly stay that way until late February. Then it would be storm season, and after the usual batch of tornados, it would be May and back in the nineties. All of which certainly seemed to prove Kate’s theory that they only put the aliens here because it was the worst place they had available to put them.

Now it was Friday—a breezeless, cloudless, joyless Friday—and at just after nine o’clock in the morning, it was already ninety-three degrees and rising. They told her she’d get used to it, but there was no getting used to this kind of heat. Not the heat and not the muggy blanket of damp that kept the heat pressed up heavily against a body, along with all the hot, wet smells of the world, which, in Cottonwood, were Lovecraftian. She dreaded leaving the house, but honestly, she looked forward to the last railroad car on the first corner of the causeway where she had been made welcome all week long.

And every day, after she’d done her walking and knocked on her doors and been shoved off porches and spat on and all the rest of what made up her working day, she gratefully intruded. Sometimes, she sat with T’aki on the green chair and chatted, or read magazines with him, or listened solemnly to his increasingly epic stories of the Fortesque Freeship and its eternal struggle with the evil tin cans of Earth. Sometimes she went with them to the Heaps, and although she wasn’t very useful yet at dump-diving, she tried to pull her weight. Sanford did take them to the ‘movies’ once afterwards, which was another run-down slum building, this one with a television set inside, and an alien who charged only two chits apiece to sit on the floor and watch whatever old tapes or DVDs he was able to salvage out of the Heaps. But it really didn’t matter what they did; she was just as happy to sit in the dirt playing with T’aki as she was watching Indiana Jones in a dark pavilion with fifty alien strangers, she’d just be happier to be doing it all in decent Northwest weather.

Rounding the curve onto the causeway, Sarah heard the shrill call going out. She looked through the shacks and glimpsed movement, alien bodies darting through the alleys, ducking down here and there to watch her. It didn’t seem to be as many as there used to be when she first started. They were getting used to her, maybe. She hoped so.

The street seemed empty as she walked, with everyone inside and out of the sun. They said the aliens weren’t bothered by extreme temperatures, but she wasn’t so sure. She made her rounds resolutely, passing the relatively cooler hours until high noon knocking on doors and smiling at the people who told her to fuck off. She took a few more reports—she’d once entertained the fantasy of being the first caseworker in her group to complete a census detail, but as it stood, she was fifty names short of done and half the people in her office had already finished theirs—and chatted with whoever would tolerate it, but she didn’t get much done and she knew it.

She spent her lunch hour in the sweltering shack of a client, helping him move his depressing furniture around so that they could lay down the planks he’d purchased at the Heaps and make a ‘real’ floor. His evident pride as he measured, cut and placed each new board should have been heart-warming, but the heat killed any pleasure there might have been for her. As much as she tried to share his triumph in the finished project, all she could see was an ugly stretch of recycled lumber and a lot of heavy junk she was going to have to move on top of it. She felt ashamed and hypocritical, sure, but she also felt hot and sick and impatient and there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about that.

It was no better once that was finally done. The sun beat down on her unprotected head like a skillet and what little breeze blew at all was coming in directly over the Heaps; she found herself thinking, quite clearly and without much emotion, that Hell itself could not be worse than Cottonwood. Thank God she could go home or at least go back to the office to do pretend-work in an air-conditioned cubicle. The rest of her day seemed to stretch out for miles, wavering in the heat…but at the end of it was Sanford’s house.

But why wait? She needed the emotional smoothie of a cute little kid playing Trucks before she got back to the spitting and shoving. She headed back toward the causeway, her briefcase dangling from her sweaty hand, seeing nothing but the trash-strewn road in front of her, thinking of nothing but Sanford’s open door and T’aki bouncing his hellos when he saw her, humming endless love-is’s in smiling, toneless distraction.

“Hello, caseworker.”

Samaritan seemed to come from nowhere, unfolding himself from the shade of a burned-out trailer to a sudden and menacing height, damned near at arm’s reach of her. Sarah leapt back, her heart suddenly and senselessly pounding, and lost her grip on her briefcase. It hit the ground and thumped over on its face. Samaritan’s dusty foot covered it in the next instant, before she could even think of bending down to grab it back.

“You—” scared me, was how that wanted to end, but that would be a bad idea, wouldn’t it? And he was a client, no matter what else he was. He was her client. “Do you want something, Mr. Samaritan?” she asked, determined to stay calm, professional.

“I’m sure starting to.” He took a swig of beer/bug food slurry and tossed the can he’d been carrying it in away into the ditch. “What’s that I smell?”

“Please move your foot.”

“I smell sweat.” He leaned in close, inhaling slow. His palps spread; his breath blew back at her, rancid, sickening. The feathery black wand-like things tucked in at his abdomen shot out unexpectedly, tickling at her chest and thighs as she jumped back. He buzzed loudly, rocking his head back and forth, but just as swiftly left off his miming when she tried to go around him. His arm snapped around her waist; he pulled her hard against him, spooning up against her back, enjoying her startled struggles.

“I smell your neck sweat,” he said, palps fumbling at her throat from behind. “I smell your arm sweat.” He bent to suck a breath, ignoring her squirms as he nuzzled at her pits. Suddenly, his claspers bent out around her waist, nudging with shocking intimacy at her groin. Samaritan’s palps vibrated against her neck in a low purr. “I smell your thigh sweat.”

“Let me know when you get to my foot sweat so I can go,” Sarah snapped. She sounded only angry. Good. Her heart was pounding, though, pounding right on her ribs. “Mr. Samaritan, give me my briefcase. This isn’t funny.”

“I’m not joking.” He ducked down to rub his palps over her again, actually shoving them under the neck of her shirt to slide along her collarbones, tickling lightly between her breasts. He couldn’t possibly know how wrong that was, could he? Could he? “God, you smell good. Well, not good,” he amended thoughtfully, leaning back a little but still not letting go of her. “It’s like…It’s like eating chicken eggs. You know it’s wrong, but you get a taste for it.” The feathery brush-tips of his claspers tickled under her skirt. “It’s been years and you’d think I’d have forgotten, or at least changed my mind about how to remember it, but you—” He pulled her, struggling, even closer. “—smell so damn good.”

The thorns along his side seemed to be digging at her back in pulses, as if he were rubbing himself sideways on her. Not scary on its own, but weird enough to fake it in a big way. Sarah succumbed to a quick spate of panic, just a few seconds’ worth, which Samaritan leaned back to watch. The causeway was empty, but the alleys weren’t. She kicked and twisted and gasped out short, shrill whimpers, and people were back there watching, just watching!

“You’re embarrassing yourself,” Samaritan remarked. “What exactly is it that you think I’ll do to you?”

She stared at him, pulled as far away as she could get (which wasn’t far), shivering in the heat.

“You’re no different from the rest of them,” he told her. “You think you are, but you’re not. You’re my caseworker, right? You work for me, isn’t that what you always say? You call me Mister and you say sir, but under all that, you’re just another meat-sack afraid of the big, bad bugs.”

“I am nuh-not!” She squirmed futilely in his effortless grip and snapped, “And that’s not fair! You’re trying to scare me!”

“It’s not fair?” He rolled his eyes, scuttling out another low laugh. “It’s not fair,” he told the sky. “Look around you, caseworker. Fair doesn’t come here very fucking often. And I don’t have to try very hard,” he added. “See, I don’t have a cute little kid, so this is what I have to do to get your attention.”

She stopped struggling and stood frowning in his uncomfortable clutch. “That’s not true.”

“Yeah? How many times have you ever knocked on my door, caseworker?”

She opened her mouth, closed it without speaking.

Samaritan held up one hand and extended his longest finger. “Once,” he said solemnly. “One time. Not even one whole hour. And how many days have you walked right past me since then? How many times have you even said hello?”

Damn him, she was blushing. “Well, you’re—”

“I’m what?” he interrupted, and suddenly flared his mandibles, clicking in exaggerated bug-speak inches from her face. “I’m mean to you? You only work for the nice ones?”

She had no answer.

“I used to be nice.” He drew back. His claspers twitched and came out to tickle at her thighs again. His gaze unfocused. “I used to be a lot of things. You smell good.”

“Th-Thank you.” That probably wasn’t the right answer, but she honestly didn’t know what else to say. “Please let go of me.”

“You are so polite,” he said in a slow, wondering way. The feathery tips of his claspers slipped up under her skirt. He was fast. Before she could flinch or even suck in a breath to yelp, he’d brushed them all the way up her thighs to her panties and tucked them up again. “And so fucking sweet.”

“That was very inappropriate!” she said. Tried to say. Squeaked. “Let go of me right now! I have got to get back to work!”

“I am your work.” Samaritan put his other arm around her, took her wrist, and released her waist. She leapt back at once and he let her, but kept his grip, keeping her firmly tethered to him no matter how she struggled. “You don’t have to like it, but I am your fucking work just as much as fucking Sanford and his cute little kid.”

“Fine,” she managed, prying futilely at his fingers. They were as good as steel, absolutely immoveable. “If there’s suh-something you want, I have s-some forms.”

“You have some forms.” He eyed the briefcase he was still stepping on. Then he shrugged, or at least, came as close to a shrug as one of his kind could, and picked it up. “Come on, let’s have a look at your forms.”

Every shred of common sense she had was screaming at her that this was not a good idea, but Samaritan let go of her and strolled away, still carrying her briefcase. He reached the causeway, turned toward his house and paused to look back at her.

She didn’t move.

‘It’s my job,’ she thought bleakly. When that failed to budge her, she thought, sternly now, ‘What are you going to do, go back and ask for another stupid briefcase?’ and that did the trick. Her feet started moving and before she knew it, she was squeezing past him and his groping claspers into the dark oven of his house. She told herself it was just another juvenile game and tried not to see the way he scanned the empty causeway before shutting the door again. Shutting it, and tying it closed. He drew the curtains on his dingy windows, dropped the briefcase on a sagging sofa, and came toward her.

She backed up, but there just wasn’t anywhere to go. The area in which they stood, his kitchen/living/dining room wasn’t much bigger than her bathroom. If she retreated much further, where would she be but in his bedroom? So she stopped.

He didn’t.

“Okay, I’m here. What is it that you want?” she demanded, tried to demand. Her voice cracked.

Samaritan leaned in close again, palps shoving at her cheek. “I want to fuck,” he clicked. “Let’s requisition that, shall we?”

She got back fast, banging her hip on the table in her speed to put it between them. He straightened up and watched her, squeezing snickers out through his snapping palps. It was a cute laugh on T’aki. It was hair-raising on Samaritan.

“Relax,” he said, and suddenly jumped completely over the table and behind her, catching at her arm almost before she could grasp that he was really there. “Relax, I’m not going to hurt you. Human females like me, and do you know why?” He slipped his free hand around her waist, rubbing little circles over her stomach. “Because I’m never done until they are. Guaranteed.”

“Let go,” she said. And yanked at his steely grip. Then pushed at him. And finally let out a shout and really fought, bouncing slaps and kicks harmlessly off his chitin.

He let her, laughing, for a few seconds, then swung her around and shoved her flat on the table. Bang, and she was down, her cheek pressed painfully against the splintery wood, her chest crushed flat and breathless. He held her easily, with one hand. “Calm down,” he said.

“Let go of me!”

“I’ll let go when you calm down.” He reached past her to the refrigerator for a fresh beer. She heard the crack-hiss as he opened it. She heard the wet grunts as he drank. “I can wait.”

She wanted to tell him to get off of her. She wanted to sound hot and strong and maybe even a little bored, as if this were tiresome but not terrifying. She wanted to tell him…but could think of nothing. She had no breath. She had no words. She couldn’t understand what was happening. The more she tried, the more the room just seemed to bleed out. What could he possibly do to her anyway? He was unisexual (having one gender, the ghost of orientation muttered, the male gender), he shouldn’t even know what sex was.

“I kind of like fucking humans, to tell the truth,” Samaritan remarked. “They’re warm. You may have noticed we don’t care a lot about the weather, but we do feel it, and to feel that hot body on the inside…” He exhaled in a low skree and rubbed his palps on her neck. “Very nice.”

“Let m-me up r-right now. I’m c-calm.”

“No. You know what I think is funny? I said I wanted to fuck, a perfectly harmless observation, and you just assumed I meant with you. That’s funny to me. That makes me think maybe you’d like a little chitin in you.” He bent over her, squeezing her between his rigid chest, the wooden table. “Is that it, caseworker? Are you curious? It’s okay to be curious.”

“D-Don’t—”

“Relax, I keep saying. I won’t hurt you.” He stroked a few strands of hair back from her face. “I have never hurt a human woman yet. Not the way you’re thinking.”

“I’m not afraid of you!”

“Yes, you are,” he replied evenly. “But you shouldn’t be. We’re just talking, you and I. Anything we do later, well, that’s later…and I promise you’ll have a good time. I know exactly what to do and I’m good at it. Hang on.” He lifted himself up just enough to untuck his claspers and wrap them around her waist. He settled again, the hard angles of his hips wedged between her buttocks and the feathery tips of his claspers tapping and rubbing under her skirt. “That’s better.”

“Please get off me!”

“That’s right, please and thank you.” He drank. She could feel his hand splayed open between her shoulderblades, relaxed, comfortable. “So polite. Like that first girl on the boat and I’m not sure she really counts. I don’t think she spoke much English.”

“What g-girl? W-What boat?”

She felt him still and then he uttered a short, humorless laugh and pushed his can of beer to the far end of the table. “I’m getting drunk,” he explained. “Maybe you should do some of the talking for a while.”

“What boat?” she asked again, desperately.

“I don’t want to talk about that.” He started to push his claspers up her thighs again.

“Please! Let’s…Let’s at least get to know each other!”

He breathed, hot and wet and heavy on the back of her neck, and suddenly sighed. “Fine.” He retracted his claspers, but didn’t get off her. “But only because I like it when you beg. So, okay, they put us on a boat in the beginning,” Samaritan began with sour humor. “Eight of us in a room half this size. No window. Air through a fan in the ceiling. No place to piss but a bucket and no place to dump it out. Half a year, they kept us while they built their first fucking immigration camp.”

“Mr. Samaritan, can we sit—”

“Hush,” he said, giving her a light tap on the head, just exactly the sort of thing she’d seen Sanford do when T’aki got especially rambunctious. “I’m talking now. We got an hour on deck every few days. Thousands of us, pressed up there in the rain and the wind, looking up at the ship. They called it our shower and our exercise. Your sweat really, really smells good.” His claspers pushed at her thighs from behind and he laughed again. “It’s distracting me. Okay. My…fifth shower…I think. Some of your soldiers picked me out, offered to give me a little extra food if I went with them.”

“Mr. Sa—”

“Hush, I said. We’re talking, just like you wanted. Isn’t it cozy? Don’t you feel like you’re just doing worlds of good?” He cinched his claspers tightly around her waist, then bent down and rested on top of her. His whole hard body covered her back, his arms folded casually atop her head for a chinrest. “Where was I? The soldiers. They brought their own boat, a little one. They had a she-human, the first I’d seen. They said they’d give me food—and it wasn’t that canned shit back then either—to watch me fuck this girl. This baffled me. They didn’t know anything about us. They didn’t know if I had anything that could do the job, or even if I did, what it would do to her. They just wanted to see bug inside human, and I get the feeling that if I had hurt her, that would have been perfectly all right with them…maybe even better.”

She said nothing, could scarcely understand him. He lifted up his head and gave hers a tap. “Listening?”

She nodded.

“Fine. I fucked her. They made pictures of it. And it wasn’t bad. Like sticking my—” Clicks and whines the translator couldn’t make sense of. “—into hot soup in a sack. And she loved it. Nervous at first, but really got into it once I figured out what they wanted me to do. Polite. Every other word was please or thank you, but like I say…I don’t think she knew what she was saying. She called me Mister too,” he said thoughtfully and for a short time, he was quiet, but when Sarah shifted beneath him, he started talking again. “They came and got me a lot after that. Almost every time I was on deck. Different girl. Same boat. Sometimes they wanted to do things to her at the same time as me, things I can’t even call fucking. It was bizarre. I ate a lot. Real food. Bread. Meat. Chocolate.” He laughed. “Those were my best days, caseworker.”

“I’m s-sorry.”

His laughter stopped. Everything stopped. He clicked once or twice, but that was all. Slowly, he took his hands off her head and put them on the table to either side of her. He pushed himself up, not far. “Sorry for what?” he asked blackly.

“What they did to you was wrong,” she whispered.

“Wrong? No, what’s wrong—” He got up fast and dragged her with him, spinning her, shoving her hard against the wall. “—is that there’s no trade for it here. That’s wrong, human. In Buena Vista, I was guaranteed two rations of real meat every day for what I did to those girls. In Silverbrook, I about lived on the picture set. I had a bed, caseworker. I had my own shower with hot water and soap. Here? I could fuck you until the table breaks and I won’t see one extra can. All I get is you so don’t ruin that for me! You want to fight, fight, but don’t you fucking talk to me about what’s wrong!”

She stared at him, now shaking freely, the acrid bug food/beer/bile stink of his breath swimming in her lungs. “I’m sorry,” she said again. It was all she could think of. “I’m so sorry.”

His eyes narrowed. “Get out,” he said.

“Mr. Samaritan—”

She only wanted to ask for her briefcase, but she never had the chance. She said his name and in the very next instant, he seized her by the neck of her blouse, yanked open his door, and threw her out.

“I’m sorry!” she babbled, scrambling back, and he grabbed her and threw her again. Light stabbed her, spinning as she tumbled off the porch. Something huge and hard hit her head; she guessed it was the ground. Something else slammed into her chest; her official IBI briefcase, thrown after her.

“You don’t get to feel sorry for me!” the translator said evenly as Samaritan loomed over her, snapping and skreeing. She tried to sit up. He knocked her down again under his foot and shoved, sending her scraping over hot dirt and loose trash to smack up against his car. “I didn’t do anything wrong! Save your fucking sorries, you fucking bag of meat! If you ever—”

Then a crack like the world’s biggest egg breaking and he was gone.

Eclipse. What? Sky grey. Sun grey. No, wait, it was coming back. Ouch. Head. She fumbled up to try and touch it and hit someone else’s head instead. Little head. Focus.

“Jellybean,” she croaked, surprised.

“Get up,” T’aki clicked, tugging at her shirt.

“I don’t think I can, honey.”

More of that shrieking, fingernail-on-chalkboard, blatt-of-untuned-trumpet, clicks and snaps loud enough to hurt her ears. The translator brought it all to her calmly, dispassionately: “—kill IBI’s human in front of your own house? In front of my house!” Sound of eggs hitting eggs.

“Get up,” T’aki said again, now getting under her arm and pushing. He was stronger than he looked. They all were.

Sarah managed her knees and then had to wait for her stomach to settle. T’aki kept trying to heave her up. He could almost do it. She started to ask him where his father was, and then realized, of course, who was shouting.

She looked up against the metallic sun and saw Sanford punch Samaritan three times in the face—pow pow pow. She’d never imagined the aliens were punchers, not with those skinny arms, but those looked like nasty blows. Samaritan swung back at him; Sanford dodged it easily and socked him twice more, in the neck this time. And while Samaritan clutched his throat and hacked on air, Sanford jumped straight up and brought his thorny elbow down smack on top of Samaritan’s head.

She heard the crunch even through her haze. It was as good as an ice-water dip at sobering her.

Samaritan dropped to his knees, arms up like he was surrendering to IBI’s soldiers. Sanford drew back his fist, and Sarah shouted, “Oh God, no, don’t kill him!” and then immediately had to grab her head in both hands and stagger against the rusty car. Felt like her brains were splitting.

When she could straighten up, they were staring at her, Samaritan and Sanford both. “Don’t kill him,” she said again, trying to walk.

“Who said anything about killing?” Sanford spat, and put Samaritan on the ground with a disgusted shove.

There was a crack in the top of his head, oozing blood as red as hers. “Fuck off,” he said dully, rolling onto his back. “I’m fine. Sunbathing. You know I can see right up your skirt from here, caseworker. Your cunt wants out of its cocoon.” He laughed.

Sanford stomped on his chest before Sarah could even begin to feel offended. Another crunch. She and Samaritan shrieked together.

“She loves me,” Samaritan grunted, and vomited bug food and beer into the street.

“You’re a pig and I’m getting you a doctor!” she babbled, fumbling at her hips for her phone. Couldn’t find it. Right, no pockets. In her case. Where was her case?

“You touch that fucking phone and I’ll snap your fingers off,” Samaritan said, and took a foot to his chest again, splitting the crack in his chitin wider. He lay gasping, both hands pressed over the wound, then hauled himself upright and threw up again. “Doctors don’t come to Cottonwood,” he said, and spat a few times. “They take us away and they don’t bring us back. Just think of how sorry you’d be then.” He cocked his head and studied her. “You look terrible. I don’t even want you anymore.”

“Fuck you!” she shrilled.

“Some other time. Not feeling too well for some reason.” He spat black chaw at Sanford’s feet, then laughed as he limped woodenly toward his house. “But you come back again, caseworker. You know I love it when we talk.”

Sanford caught her arm. He didn’t look at her, just started walking. T’aki took her other hand, gamefully holding it over his head as he ran along beside her. “I think I’m okay,” she said. Neither one answered.

His computers were on. His workstool had fallen. Wires, screws, and pieces of a circuit board laid a path to his door. He helped her over it and sat her down in the wheezy green chair. T’aki immediately climbed into her lap and Sanford just as immediately lifted him off and set him down again. “Go outside,” he said. “Watch for humans.”

T’aki went.

Sanford righted his seat, picked up a few things, then simply sat and stared at her. “I would give you water, but it isn’t clean,” he said finally. “You will have to wait to wash your wounds.”

“I have wounds?” She reached up to feel delicately at the throbbing place at the back of her head and looked in surprise at the blood on her fingers.

“Have you had a tetanus shot?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He looked at her some more. His breath sounded very loud, louder than usual. Of course, they all sounded like they were breathing through a thin layer of tomato juice, but still… “What did he do?”

“Nothing.”

He snorted disgustedly at her and swung around to throw things at his computer.

“I think he was just trying to scare me,” she said. “Then he threw me out. I fell bad, I guess. That’s all.”

Slam. Smack. Solder.

“Honest, Sanford,” she said, wondering why she was insisting. “He knocked me down, he didn’t really hit me. And the next I knew, you were hitting him.”

He clicked sourly. “Why did you stop me?”

“Being a jerk is not a capital offense,” she argued.

“Is that all?”

“What else would it be, for God’s sake? Well, okay, I’d hate to do the paperwork on a dead client, but mostly, I just don’t want to see even a jerk like Samaritan get killed.”

“Do you think every bug is a killer?”

Taken aback by this furious attack, she could only stammer, “You broke him open, Sanford!”

“He won’t die from that.”

“I thought…I mean, if you stab a scorpion or something, they don’t heal…”

He shot her a hot, venomous stare and snapped, “We are not scorpions!”

She felt herself blush. “I know that. I just thought—”

“I know what you thought!” He swung back and tinkered with his machines.

She shrank back a little, then ventured, “Are you mad at me?”

He stilled for perhaps two seconds, then continued working. “No. I just don’t want to see humans sprawled bleeding over my doorstep.”

She started to stand up, thinking numbly to leave, or at least to get out of his house before she started crying.

He reached back without turning and put his hand on her arm. He didn’t grab her, just touched her. His head bent slightly. In a much gentler voice, he said, “Sit down, please.”

Sarah obeyed, one hand pressed to her still-aching head, the other rubbing at her stomach, which had begun to cramp in misery. ‘Bad day,’ she told herself, and tried to think of all the other bad days she’d had and now could shrug off—the fry machine bursting out the bottom and flooding the burger station where she worked with boiling oil during lunch rush, landscaping jobs in the rain when she had to dig up and replant three dozen trees because the owner couldn’t decide where he wanted them, family reunion day at the diner when that kid threw up in her pocket and doused all her tips, the list went on and on and she hadn’t shriveled up and died yet. This was just another bad day and she’d get through it.

‘At least it can’t get any worse,’ she thought, then shivered for no reason at all.

* * *

Sanford tried to work, but neither his mind nor his hands would steady. Behind him, Sarah sat, so quiet that were it not for the smell of her filling up his house, he would have believed himself alone. Now and then, he looked her way, but she never seemed to be sleeping, only leaned back against the torn cushion of the uncomfortable chair with her head between her hands. Her hair was matted, stiffly jutting as antennae, stained with blood, but the wound did not seem to be worsening. It had been an hour by his computer’s time, and he began to believe the altercation had gone unnoticed.

‘Don’t kill him,’ she’d said. Not that he would have, but…the sound of her cry when he’d kicked Sam open…

She could stand there bleeding and still try to stop him from hurting the very man who had hurt her. It had made him feel ugly and savage—it made him feel like a bug—and so naturally, he’d brought her home and yelled at her. Damn her. And damn him. And damn this whole stinking planet.

Outside, he could hear his son at play, doubtless sprawled happily in this human trash-heap with all his toys—new and old—gathered around him. Today, the familiar growls of his son eternally building and unbuilding roads in the dirt had been broken by a more exciting story; he could hear the quiet skrees and chitters of play-battles as his toys fought and were gradually overwhelmed until: “The Fortesque Freeship! Quick, get in! Shhhhhooooom!”

Sanford watched the toy ship bounce past his window once, then twice, and finally come in for a landing.

“Now we’re safe,” said T’aki, somewhat breathless. “Let’s get out of the ship. Oh no! It’s IBI! How did they get here? Did they catch a cab?”

Sanford glanced at Sarah. Human expressions were difficult to read even though their faces were so grossly pliant, but he thought she was smiling, just a little. He thought he’d ought to say something to her, but he didn’t know what to say.

Outside, the ferocious battle between empty food cans and a yellow-haired human doll abruptly silenced itself. “Father!” T’aki hissed. “Van! Big van!”

Sarah looked up. Sanford swore and waved her down again before she could rise. Well, here it was. And now, was it worse for her to walk bloodied from his home or for IBI to burst in and find her as if hidden away? Hell. Why hadn’t he sent her away?

Sanford looked out the crack of his window, trying to judge the danger, but what he saw was not the white van of IBI’s soldiers, but the black one. The black one.

He sprang up, pulled the door. “Inside!” he ordered. “Hide!”

Sarah stood, as if to obey him herself. Since she was up, hardly able to believe he was trusting her, Sanford shoved back the chair and pulled the rug beneath it, exposing the hatch door. “Down,” he hissed. “Not a sound!”

T’aki went, his toy ship clutched in both hands, and Sanford covered it all up again.

“What’s going on?” Sarah asked.

“Population Enforcement is coming.”

Her eyes were clear, uncomprehending. “But he’s legal. He’s licensed.”

“That means nothing to these people!” he spat, and then froze, the fine hairs above his ear quivering.

The engines had stopped and stopped close. Sanford went to the window again, his hands empty, useless. He should never have had a son. Stupid man, to bring an innocent boy into this hell. “Now you will see me kill,” he said bleakly, as the black doors opened. “If they don’t find him, when they are gone, take him…take him to someone you trust.”

“What are you—”

“Quiet. They’re coming.”

Three humans came out of the van. Three men with guns. They stood in a loose ring, talking, smoking, laughing. Then they started walking, not to Sanford’s door, but to Baccus’s.

Sarah brushed against him, crouching low even as she peered through the broken pane. “What’s going on?”

“Stay down, damn it! Don’t let them see you.”

They did not knock. They bashed the door in with the butts of their guns and pulled Baccus out. She knew what they’d come for. Kneeling, her hands shaking on her head, Baccus watched the guns and waited.

“Where’s the bacon, bug?” someone asked, and they all laughed. They were playing for now, tapping their muzzles against Baccus’s head while she feigned confusion. Sometimes that worked. It wouldn’t work today. They were having too much fun, and that kind of fun didn’t end without blood. “You must have been hungry last night. You done et it up, bones and all. And yet you still manage to keep that boyish figure.”

“I don’t understand,” Baccus said. “Please—”

And then Sanford’s door was thrown open and Sarah was marching down the causeway, all bloody hair and torn clothing, shouting, “What the hell is going on here?”

She startled them, but they recovered fast, withdrawing their guns from Baccus’s face to aim sullenly at the ground. The leader of the three stepped up to meet her, his face pulling tight with anger. “This don’t concern you, Pollyanna. Turn your ass around and move on.”

She reached Baccus and stepped in front of her, unhesitatingly putting herself between her and the guns. “I want you back in that van and off my road, right now! You can’t go breaking into people’s h—”

He slapped her, his open hand snapping across her mouth lightly, playfully. She staggered and he pointed at her. “No more of that, Pollyanna,” he said. “No more. You don’t know me very well, and I’m in a forgiving mood, but you don’t give me orders. Boys?”

“I’m not finding the door here,” one of the soldiers called, rooting inside Baccus’s house. “But I’m sure smelling it.”

“Get out of this man’s house this minute!” Sarah shouted. And when the other low soldier raised his gun at her, she actually snatched it out of his hands and threw it to one side. Sanford groaned. A second later, she was sprawling beside Baccus.

The leader bent down and hauled her onto her knees by her hair. “Do you see what it says on the van, sweetheart?” he demanded, shaking her. “Huh? Do they still teach dumb hicks like you to read? Population Enforcement, that’s what it says. That means we are working, and you are shutting the fuck up and letting us work.”

“This is an illegal search!” she shouted. “I’m reporting this!”

Laughter, from all but the leader. He stared down at his prisoner with an expression that was almost one of wonder. Sanford felt his heart throb again, sickly certain he was about to witness his first human/human murder. Even Baccus was leaning away as much as she could, trying to take herself out of the line of fire when that gun went off. Only Sarah remained oblivious to her impending death.

“You’re telling, is that what I just heard you say? You’re going to tell on us, you little playground snitch? No, sugartits, I’m telling you. Article 89-A of the Alien Control Bylaws ratified by IBI and the United Nations says all I need is a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity to enter any bug’s residence, and I got that when this bug—” He gave Baccus a kick to the chest. “—was seen dragging a whole pig home last night and the night before.”

“A pig?”

“Two pigs. In two days. Now the only reason these roaches make off with that much meat is for their little egg farms, which, thanks to Article 89, I am not just allowed to shut down, but ordered to. Got it? Now shut the fuck up. Davis! Did you get lost in there?”

“Hold your water, chief, it’s coming. Get clear!”

The soldiers stepped back as a long section of the back wall of Baccus’s house shuddered, came loose, and dropped with a bang onto the hard ground, kicking up a cloud of rust-red dust and releasing an even greater cloud of black flies and rotten meat stink. The hatchery was not very big, and the sheer number of evenly-spaced eggs packed into it on racks made it seem even smaller. He’d known she was doing this, of course, but he had no idea how many eggs she’d made. How she’d managed to hide the hatchery this long was really the only mystery.

The eggs were black and narrow mouth-pipes protruded from each one; they had molted in the egg already and were nearly due. The first pig was gone, nothing but a heap of bones too big for Baccus to eat. The heat had already done its work on the second pig, which hung bloated and discolored over the hatchery, its head and forelegs already gnawed away and regurgitated. Baccus tended her eggs very well for a hatchery. Every one, shiny and fat and neatly marked to set them apart from the others. Every one, skreeing weakly at daylight. Sanford could see yang’ti gathering in the alleys, but none came too close. No one wanted to be seen here, but some, he knew, were surely the fathers.

Sarah didn’t seem to understand. She gripped the hand that held her hair, staring into the hatchery. Her face in the sunlight was white, save where it had been smeared by blood.

“You never seen one of these, I’m guessing,” said the man who held her. “It’s one of their egg farms. Look at ‘em all. See, this is why we need enforcement, because every one of these buggie fucks can spit out fifty or sixty eggs at a time. If we didn’t do this—”

“They’re alive,” Sarah said hoarsely, still staring at the keening eggs. “You’re scaring them. They’re crying.”

“Not for long. Go ahead, boys.”

The other two soldiers moved into the hatchery, opening crates and cupboards, searching for hidden eggs. The noise was tremendous, terrifying. The unborn yang’ti cried and rocked inside their shells. Two days, and they would have hatched. Two days and they would have been safe. His heart ached.

“What are you doing?” Sarah cried. “Stop it! Stop it, you’re hurting them!”

“That’s the point, Pollyanna.”

“They’re screaming!”

And they laughed at her, laughed and started smashing eggs, ending newborn squeals one stomp at a time. Chaw rose in Sanford’s throat; he swallowed it and did not make a sound.

“This is how we control the population, sweetheart,” the lead soldier said. “Remember what your orientation tapes said: They’re not alive until they can jump around.”

Sarah, frantic as no yang’ti could dare to be, lunged to one side, seized a rusted chunk of metal lying in the street, and smashed it with both hands into the man’s leg. Things happened very quickly after that.

He bellowed and drove his boot at her face, knocking her sprawling against Baccus. She jumped up bleeding and ran directly at the eggs, as if anything at all could be done, as if anyone of them could still be saved. A second soldier grabbed at her as she went by; she grappled with him while he laughed at her, then suddenly drove her knee up into his groin and wrenched away from him. She lunged again for the hatchery—

And fell limp as a sack of sand when the third soldier cracked her on the head with his gun. She hit the ground heavy, abruptly silent, and lay motionless in the dust.

The lead soldier limped over and the three of them stood around her, contemplative. Yang’ti shifted in the alleys, peered from the windows. Baccus’s arms minutely lowered.

Sarah did not move.

“Fuck me, did I kill her?”

To determine, the lead soldier kicked her.

No response.

He squatted and gripped at her throat. “She’s breathing now,” he said. “And that’s good enough. Let’s finish up and get out of here before that changes. Bad luck to you, buggies,” he called. “That’s an agent of IBI lying there. She dies in Cottonwood and we get to open up the big cans of Raid.”

All three laughed. They went back to work, smashing the last of the eggs and spraying down the entire hatchery with accelerant. One of the soldiers threw in an incendiary striker. With a muted thumping sound, the flames ignited. Baccus watched her home and eggs burn as the humans retreated. Their leader gave Sarah one more investigative kick before boarding his vehicle. The van roared. They drove away.

Sarah did not move.

Sanford bolted for the door, heard a tattoo of fists on the floor, and paused long enough to let his son out of the cramped lower room. T’aki was out the door ahead of him, flying to the human’s side. Several other yang’ti were there too, clicking and muttering to one another. Baccus had run off already, but oddly, Sam was there, kneeling at her head and feeling at her soft and hideously vulnerable veins, and suddenly that vague familiarity that had always hovered around Sam snapped into place. He’d been a medic. That was how Sanford knew him. He’d been one of the ship’s surgeons.

“She’s alive,” Sam said tersely, probing at the back of Sarah’s head now. “She’s bleeding, but I think they only broke her skin, not her bones. Get her legs. They want to flop. Turn her over with me, and…turn.”

She did want to flop. Too limp. Too white. One eye was partially open. Not a good sign in any species. Sam pried it open all the way, then the other. He clicked judiciously and felt at her throat again. “Pupils are even and reactive. Pulse is…not great, but okay. She’s fine. Lucky she’s so thick-headed.” He glanced up into the burning house. The dead larvae were only smoking husks now, but there was the furniture, still blazing away. “We need to get her away from this before that funny shit on her head catches. Help me get her back to my place.”

“Why? So you can throw her out again?” Sanford snapped, carefully working an arm beneath Sarah’s limp neck, mindful of his spikes.

Sam actually looked surprised for a second, and then annoyed. “Fuck you, I barely touched her! And what are you going to do, change her batteries?”

Sanford stood up, holding Sarah possessively close.

Sam started to speak, glanced down the yet-empty causeway in the direction of the nearest gate, and buzzed rudely instead. “Fine,” he said. “Keep her quiet for at least an hour and don’t let her leave until she’s walking straight. She does anything strange, babbles or slurs or starts puking, send the boy. I’ll stay sober.”

“You’d have to get sober to stay that way.”

Sam’s antennae whipped flat, smacking against the shell of his head. His eyes were clear and furious and for that instant, he was not drunk or dirty or even captive on this world. He stood up fast, towering over Sanford, and said, snapping hard and buzzing under every word, “You take another shot at me and I’ll put you on the fucking ground. Get her out of the fucking sun right now and if she isn’t awake in five minutes, you better send your fucking kid.” He spat chaw on the ground and glared. “I’ll stay sober.”

Sanford kicked dirt over the chaw-stain, already baked dry in this heat, and took Sarah away with him. She began to come around even as he was setting her in the chair, so maybe she wasn’t hurt as badly as she looked. She groaned like rusty hinges, panted twice, and groaned again. It occurred to him only then that he’d never really seen a human in pain for any great length of time. He didn’t even know if these were normal sounds.

She reached up, groping, missed her head and clutched the chair instead. Her eyes, shut, squinted tighter. She uttered a cracked cry, one that was almost as much confusion as pain.

T’aki tried to climb into her lap. Sanford pulled him back, but not before her eyes opened. She stared in agony and without comprehension at his room. Then she said and did a horrible thing. “Oh, thank God, I dreamed it,” was what she said. What she did was look out the window and see smoke.

He would have given much not to see the crumpling of her face in anguish and understanding. It was too much like his own heart throbbing, given hideous life in expression, too much like all that must be hidden for fear of provoking laughing men with guns.

She lunged up.

Sanford pushed her gently down.

“They’re burning!” she cried, fighting him.

“They’re burnt.” He waited, keeping careful pressure on her, until it had found her mind and latched. “They’re burnt, Sarah. It’s done.”

He had never used her name before, wasn’t sure he could pronounce it, but it came out just fine, as things so often do when you don’t think about them.

She stared at him, her eyes pouring water. Then she tried again to stand, her mouth working, cutting panic into words he doubted she planned. “We have to put the fire out. Help me. There’s hoses along the aqueduct. We have to put the fire out!”

She would not be still, so he followed her, catching at her arm when she stumbled, as she frequently did. He followed her to the crumbling wall and held her while she patted along it in confusion, seeking hoses that had never been.

“They’re supposed to be here,” she kept saying. “They’re supposed to…They… What…” She turned around, staring in glaze-eyed horror at the smoking ruin of Baccus’s home and hatchery. “What is this place?” she shouted, and fell over into Sanford’s awkward grip, braying tears.

He had nothing comforting to tell her. He took her back inside.

* * *

Security had orders to alert him the minute Miss Fowler returned, but she got in. She didn’t sneak in, she just walked in, past the empty desk, where a certain security guard had gone absent to cadge a smoke, and on up to the second floor and her own cubicle. She’d been quietly writing up paperwork for half an hour before Piotr noticed her on the cameras. He directed the girl to van Meyer’s attention and both went out to confront her.

They were almost on top of her before she looked up. She did it without hatred or anger or even indignation. She looked exhausted. She also looked as though she’d been packed in a barrel and rolled off a cliff. Van Meyer shot his hyena a hard stare, then gave Pollyanna a polite nod. “Are we paying you overtime, Miss Fowler?”

“Incident reports,” she said, with difficulty. Her mouth was swollen.

“Reports? Plural, do I hear?”

Piotr shifted, sneering.

“They might be related. I’m not sure. There was a fire. And I fell down.”

“Fell down,” Piotr snorted.

She looked at him again, her brows knitting as with confusion. She nodded. “I think so. Things got ugly with a…with a client.”

The two men exchanged glances. A bug, had she been about to say? Their Pollyanna?

“He gave me a shove off his doorstep. I tripped.” Her hand rubbed at her head. “I think I blacked out for a bit. Things get really confused. I can’t really…I know I was awake because I can remember…the fire…I couldn’t find the hoses on the aqueduct…I think I hit some of the…of the residents…and I’m all banged up. I just don’t know.”

“Well, don’t you worry about that,” van Meyer said slowly. “It is your health that concern us most. Are you very injured?”

“I don’t think so. I was going to go to Urgent Care in Wheaton…make sure.” Rub, rub at the head. “I figure it’s a weekend and I have time to just lie around and recover. I’m sure I’ll be back on Monday, I just…I just don’t know exactly what happened. I’m sorry, Mr. van Meyer.”

She was nearly in tears. Van Meyer waved slightly to push Piotr back, then gave the girl a broad smile, a grandfatherly pat on her shoulder. “Not at all. I want you to go—leave that, it’s quite complete enough—go down to the medical wing right here, Basement level, D-Wing, and have them look you over, ja?”

“I haven’t got my insurance paperwork back yet. I don’t think I’m covered.”

“But you turn it in, nee? Quite all right, I will see to all things. You go now. Go, go!” he coaxed, still grandfatherly, smiling.

She smiled back, her hand at her head, and got up. Her step was slow, but mostly even. She did not give Piotr more than a nod in passing.

When she was gone, the two men stood quiet.

“Well?” van Meyer said, no longer grandfatherly. “Do I just see Academy Award for Best Actress, eh?”

“Uh, yeah, about that…” Piotr avoided his eyes, unaccustomed to confession. “When she first came at us, I noticed she’d been kinda roughed up. Blood in her hair, that sort of thing. And she was sure acting hysterical, like maybe she wasn’t thinking clearly. I just assumed she was doing her Pollyanna, Queen of the Bugs bit, but yeah, she could have taken a hit.”

“Before or after you crack her skull?”

“That was Davis and he didn’t hit her that hard. One of the bugs must have given her a thump. The way she was carrying on…maybe she had a concussion.” Piotr shrugged one shoulder, his eyes still averted but narrowed with what seemed sincere confusion.

His hyena did not lie to his Master. If Piotr’s men had roughed over the girl, he would admit this thing, apologize, make amends. If he said now that there had been sign on her of some earlier altercation, then sign there had surely been.

“So.” Van Meyer picked up the incident reports and scanned them, not for content, but seeing haphazard lettering from a hand that had heretofore been neat, large gaps in memory, clumsy punctuation. “Ja,” he said at last, almost to himself. “We give this one benefit of doubt. But you watch her, Piotr. I have seen many good actress in my time and there is something about our little Pollyanna I do not trust. Not one whit.”

* * *

The medical wing at IBI was better manned and better outfitted than most hospitals Sarah had seen, even those on TV, which Sarah guessed only made sense if your patients got their arms ripped off on a regular basis. Van Meyer’s promise was apparently good; his name and a phone call got Sarah in to a doctor in just two minutes. He asked surprisingly few questions, just cleaned her up (she had six shards of rusty metal embedded in her back, which she hadn’t even known), gave her a few X-rays, a few bandages, and a shot of what he called ‘the good stuff’. The good stuff burned going in, but soon after soaked up all the ugly heat throbbing in her head and just kind of swirled it away.

They shaved her head in patches to get at the lacerations on her scalp for stitching. The one over her ear needed twenty-three of them and had raised a knot the size of a goose egg. Looking at herself in the doctor’s shiny metal cabinet was like looking at a funhouse mirror where her reflection was slowly replaced by that of a zombie. She felt a little like crying, except that she’d done enough of that today.

“Must have been a real adventure, eh?” the doctor said as he finished. “Still…no real harm done. I doubt your bug friend knew he was roughing you over quite as hard as he was. They’re not smart…one more…and they’re fearfully strong. The important thing…there we are!…is to know what you did to set him off. Do you?”

“He knocked my papers out of my hands,” said Sarah, having decided on this lie before she even went back to the office. ‘And you are such a wicked good liar,’ Kate would always say, admiringly. ‘People just look into that big baby-eyed face and can’t believe you even know what a lie is.’ “I lost my temper and shoved him.”

“Oh ho.”

“He shoved me back.”

“Yes, he did. Into a wall or…?”

“I’m not sure. I think I might have blacked out. Stuff happened—” Stomping. Screaming. Smoke. “—I don’t remember it very well.”

“Your memory might come back, but I wouldn’t worry about it if it doesn’t, dear.” He checked her eyes, checked her stitches, and finally let her climb down from the table. “But if your bug persists in his aggressive behavior, I can’t urge you strongly enough to report him and get him removed. I don’t mean to scare you. It’s likely he won’t single you out, they don’t have the memory for stalking any one specific person. Which is why an aggressive bug is so dangerous, he’ll be dangerous to anyone, and aggressive bugs don’t limit themselves to shoving matches.” He chuckled, checked her eyes again. “He might have given you a little tap to the zygomatic bone here.” He touched her cheek below her right eye, where Piotr had kicked her away from him. “It’s cracked, and I bet it’s painful, but it ought to heal up on its own in a few weeks. I advise you to pick up some liquid meals for a day or two, and don’t spare the aspirin, but you’re all right. Have you got a way home?”

“I walked.”

“I’ll send for a driver. You live on site?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Of course,” he agreed. “Then go home, get a good sleep, and try not to worry.”

And that was that. An armed man in a flak vest drove her home. He didn’t say a word to her. She took a long shower, scrubbing her hair with the contents of an entire bottle of shampoo to get the smoke out, but the smell seemed to linger even so. She made some soup for dinner, drank two swallows, and gave the rest to Fagin, who ate even less before deciding it was gross and nosing the rest unobtrusively into a corner. He came and sat on her foot, whining, while she sat in her living room and stared at the mirror over the fake fireplace.

The sun went down. The good stuff wore off. The sound of the eggs screaming haunted her. Sarah couldn’t stand it anymore. She got up, called Fagin, found her official IBI cap where she’d tossed it in the kitchen on her first day, and went for a drive.

She didn’t want to go for a drive. Her head hurt and her vision had a way of occasionally…well, not swimming, but wanting to, which made driving intermittently terrifying, particularly in a strange town. No, she didn’t want to drive. She wanted to make a phone call.

There was a gas station right outside of IBI’s residential area, but she ignored it. She ignored the community center and the clubs. She ignored everything in IBI’s happy little village and kept driving until she’d passed the outer gate and was thirty miles away in the sleepy Kansas town of Wheaton.

Beautiful night. Hot and muggy, full of teens out for summer fun. They gathered everywhere—great whooping mobs of them—the children of IBI and the teenaged townies, mingling in a glorious intergalactic rainbow of mutual trust and respect. Integrating.

Sarah found a McDonald’s and a few bucks in change, put on her hat so she wouldn’t scare the kiddies, and went to the phone bank. Old phones. No PAS hookups. No video screens. Just phones. Kate answered on the third ring, but sleepily. That sleepiness changed to sharp silence as Sarah began a calm retelling of her day that ended in fractured and half-hysterical tears after only a few minutes.

“They burned them alive!” she sobbed, leaning into the phone to try and disguise her breakdown from anyone who might be watching. “Who could do that, Kate? For God’s sake, who burns up a houseful of screaming babies and laughs about the s-sounds it m-muh-makes?”

“Calm down, Sarah. Is this your phone?”

“N-no.”

“Not your paz?”

“No.” She hadn’t thought about that out in the open, but then again, she must have thought about it on some level, because she’d left her paz at home to drive thirty miles to a payphone. A safe phone. One IBI didn’t own. “I’m at McDonald’s.”

“Good,” Kate said, again sounding distant. “Are you hurt?”

Sarah pulled her hat down lower, feeling the sting and itch of her new stitches, the heavier ache of the gash they closed, and the whole rotten throb occupying the front of her face. “No,” she said.

“No?” Kate’s sharpest voice came swooping down on her lie like a hawk. “They came and held you nicely while they burned that guy’s house, and then let you go and patted your head and said, ‘Take care,’ and left you waving them goodbye? I’m hearing you, Sarah, I know you didn’t stand there quietly, so how bad are you hurt?”

She wanted to start crying again. Kate could always do this to her, always strip away the safe walls Sarah put up around her and leave her naked in the spotlight with all her weaknesses on display. “They knocked me down,” she admitted.

“With what?”

“That’s all!”

“Jesus Hug-a-bear Christ! I may not be able to see you on this thing, but I can hear you! You’re talking at me through a mouthful of marbles and you’re slurring every third word, so how many teeth did they take out and how many pills are you on right now? You’re scaring the shit out of me, so cut the crap and tell me how bad they hurt you!”

She did start crying again then—huge, blubbery tears like a little girl cries, hating them and hating herself for always falling into them. “He kicked me in the face and someone knocked me out, I swear that’s all! I didn’t lose any teeth! I barely got a scratch and Baccus’s babies were stomped to death and set on fire! Like you even care!” she choked out, swiping furiously at her eyes. “They’re nothing but a bunch of bugs to you, you’ve made that perfectly clear! I don’t even know why I called!”

“They’re not a bunch of bugs,” Kate said softly. “I never thought that, any more than I ever thought working with them was the dangerous part of your job. I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen to me, you just had to run off and—ah, Sarah, God damn it all, I wish you hadn’t done this!”

Silence between them, but not quite. Sarah sniffled herself under control, her breath harsh in her ears, and there was a low hiss of static on Kate’s end.

At last, her sister sighed. “Okay, Sarah, I’m going to ask you one question, just one time. I want you to think before you answer, okay?”

“Okay.”

Kate took a few deep breaths, then quietly asked, “Can you do any good there?”

“I—”

“Think before you answer.”

Sarah, miserable, thought. There was no good in Cottonwood. There were twenty-five thousand aliens packed into a landfill by men with guns, men who crushed their helpless children alive, men who dragged them out of their houses and threatened to shoot them…maybe did shoot them. Sarah couldn’t help them. Sarah couldn’t even bring them a burger and glass of clean water without getting fired. She was useless there. She was a part of the machine that ground them down.

She thought of T’aki sprawling in the dirt, playing Trucks with milk bottles and rusty cans. She thought of Baccus with his hands on his head, flinching away from the gun while his house—his children—burned. She thought of Samaritan holding her down while he cheerfully told her about the boats and the girls and what they’d made him do just so he could have a hot shower with soap.

T’aki, crawling up onto her lap. Giving her his precious Trucks to play with. Trying to tickle her, trying to be tickled. And Sanford, putting down his tools and laughing, actually laughing, over Aliens From Outer Space and the eyeball king. Going to movies, going to the Heaps, going back to sit in his house all together and just talk. Could she do them any good? She honestly didn’t know, but she didn’t want to give them up. And if she walked away now, wasn’t that the same as abandoning them? Who would ever come along who would try to do better?

“I think so,” Sarah whispered, her heart breaking at the lie.

There was a pause, and then Kate said, “Really?” in a dubious voice.

“Yes.”

“Well…okay. But I’m telling you this, Sarah, don’t argue with these people. If you ever decide you can’t hack it out there, don’t call me, don’t fight, don’t pack, don’t even get your dog, just leave. Get in your van and come right home.”

“I—”

“And don’t call me on either your home phone or your paz unless it’s to say happy birthday and what a great time you’re having out there. When people in the office tell bug jokes, you better laugh. And the next time they start breaking eggs, you stand back and let them.”

“Kate!”

“But don’t do anything stupid, like sneak in to take pictures or start blogging about how horrible it is inside the walls, and do not, I repeat, do not threaten to go to any newspapers if things get ugly with your boss. When it’s time to run, you tuck tail and run and don’t you even think of doing something Hollywood and heroic, you got me?”

Sarah said nothing. Her eyes swam. Her throat felt tight.

“I love you, kiddo,” Kate said, gently now. “And maybe I’m being paranoid about all this, but you are scaring the hell out of me tonight. My baby sister may have just put herself on IBI’s radar. IBI…nobody knows who these guys really are.”

“They’re the—”

“No, I know who they say they are now, but seriously, they are bad people.” Kate sighed again, hard. “Twenty years ago, when they first show up and start penning up the bugs, you know what their tax status was? It wasn’t a charity, Sarah. They were gun-runners.”

“That can’t be right!”

“No, it’s true. That psycho warlord leader of theirs, Damek van Meyer, said IBI would take care of them as long as they got salvage rights to the ship. And then he went straight into the bedroom with a bunch of world leaders and fucked around until they figured out who’d get what alien-goddamn-gun in exchange for permission to build one of their roach motels. And today, they’re still selling guns, only they’re not doing so much buying any more and that means they’re making them, Sarah. These great altruistic friends of yours, who bought you a super hi-tech house in their cute little gated community, are sitting on the world’s most obvious money-laundering business in history, only instead of a restaurant or a laundromat, they’re hiding behind the public’s fear of bugs to build themselves into the largest uncontrolled and unofficial weapons development and manufacturing agents in the world, with a free license to ship and trade in any country with an immigration camp. They have their own airports, their own seaports—they are their own law!”

Sarah listened, staring sightlessly into the corner of the phone bank, wishing she could disbelieve any of it.

“And in addition to turning out millions of undocumented weapons into God knows whose hands, your boss is also employing something like fifty thousand ‘security guards’ armed with top-of-the-line IBI-brand weapons and armor. This is not a security force anymore, kiddo. This is one man’s private army. And speaking of weapons, where are all those alien weapons they supposedly took off the mothership, huh?”

“They’re all locked down. Humans can’t use them.”

“We’re already using them,” said Kate. “Twenty years ago, there was no such thing as a concussion cannon or a plasma rifle or an ionizing particle blaster! Where do you think they came from? The International Bureau of Immigration holds the patent on every piece of practically every weapon used in the last three wars! Open your eyes, Sarah! They could have put all the bugs together in a bunch of apartment buildings if all they wanted was to house them. Instead, they spread them out over the globe in these dink-ass little shacks and why? So they could spread out with them and hide a couple of refineries and manufacturing plants right out in the open! And don’t tell me that’s not what’s going on, because there is no other reason on God’s green earth for anyone to have that many technicians around.”

“They could be building—”

“But they’re not,” Kate interrupted. “They’re not building anything. They put the bugs in a slum and they’re ignoring them. Jesus, if we’re lucky, they’re ignoring them, but the point I’m making is they aren’t building them a damned thing. IBI doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the bugs, they only want their stuff! And you had to go running out there and put yourself right in the middle of it all! Jesus, Sarah!”

Sarah’s head ached. She rubbed and felt fuzzy skin instead of hair, puckered scabbing stitches. She pulled her cap down lower.

“Be careful, okay?” Kate blew a sigh into the receiver, the intensity gone from her voice, now only tired again. “Be careful out there. Do good, but be careful. I love you, but you’re scaring me so bad. You’re all I’ve got.”

“I love you too,” Sarah managed.

“Go home. Go to sleep.”

“Yeah. I will.”

Kate hung up first, but gently. Sarah wiped her eyes (the left one ached, even though it was unhurt, as if her cheekbone were outsourcing its pain to other parts of the body, just to be sure she felt it all) and went back to the van.

Fagin was waiting patiently on the seat to wash her down and wonder if McDonald’s would mind giving a starving dog an ice cream cone. Sarah patted him down and dutifully promised one, but had to sit for a while behind the wheel and not think. Not think about Mr. van Meyer and Piotr coming up to see her at her desk, not think about that shiny and well-stocked medical wing in IBI’s basement, not think about Sanford shoving his son down into a hole and hissing, ‘That means nothing to these people!’, or Samaritan saying that doctors took people away and didn’t bring them back. What she thought about instead was herself, her own stupid self, walking in through the gate on her first day of work, all smiles and clean sheets of paper, ready to do some good, to be a part of the great intergalactic rainbow connecting humans and aliens in glorious integration.

“What joy,” croaked Sarah. She looked at herself in the rearview mirror and saw a gargoyle with half her face, only half. She sighed and started up the van.

Fagin got his cone and Sarah bought a burger purely by habit, but she didn’t bother trying to eat it. Her face throbbed abysmally now; it was bound to be old Fagin’s breakfast in the morning. Right now, she didn’t care about anything except a handful of pills and her bed, but as bad as she felt tonight, she was only going to feel worse tomorrow and Fagin was going to need another bag of kibble before the weekend was up, so when Sarah finally started up the van, she aimed it, not towards Cottonwood and home, but towards the ShopALot.

There, she bought a bag of Fagin’s current favorite—he snubbed food like a cat, dumb dog—and a few cans of meaty chunks to mix in, plus some self-pity candy bars and a bag of cookies she knew she’d never be able to chew, and a stack of soft-looking frozen dinners and ice cream. She got almost halfway back across the parking lot when the flimsy grocery bag split, spilling dog food and junk food all over the pavement. A car ran over her cookies as she was picking everything up. She cried and got them anyway. She’d paid for them.

With her groceries loose in the van and distinctly the worse for wear, Sarah drove around to the back of the ShopALot to look for a cardboard box she could pack them into. If she hadn’t done that, if she’d just gone home…but she didn’t. She drove out of the well-lit parking lot and into the muddy loading dock, where the van’s headlights caught an alien up against the ShopALot dumpster with nowhere to hide.

She braked and stared at him, blinking hard to make him go away. She’d hit her head. She’d hit her head and apparently the good stuff hadn’t all worn off because there was no way she was seeing this.

The alien slowly raised his arms over his head and got down on his knees.

On the other side of the ShopALot, the human side, metal carts crashed together, making the alien jump and look around. He raised his arms higher.

He was really here. In Wheaton. In the ShopALot.

Sarah got out of the van.

Funny, how quiet it was back here. Her shoes crunching over the cracked pavement and pot-holes made echoes against the side of the building. The alien’s breath—thick and snotty and way too fast—scratched at her ears. His eyes darted up to read the letters on her official IBI cap. He said, “I’m not resisting.” The clicks and rattles of his speech were loud as gunshots; they both flinched.

“What are you doing here?” Sarah asked. She didn’t know what else to say.

He stared at her, panting in that wet way. The ground around him was littered with bits of paper and plastic tubs from the ShopALot’s greasy deli. When he saw her looking at them, he quickly scraped them together and put them back in the dumpster. It wasn’t easy for him. He was shaking.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m not resisting.”

“How did you get here?”

He breathed, breathed, and finally said, “They took me out in the van. I didn’t do anything wrong. They took me.” He breathed, faster and faster, then blurted, “I don’t know where I am,” in a rush of shrill buzzing and snapping antennae. “I followed the road to the lights, but this isn’t home!”

Another shopping cart clatter made them both jump.

“You’d better get in the van before someone sees you,” Sarah said. “No one’s seen you yet, have they?”

“I don’t think so.” The alien stood up slowly, keeping his arms high.

“Why did they take you out of Cottonwood?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t do anything wrong. They just took me at the Heap Station and put me in the van.” He looked at her, his palps twitching nervously. “Are you taking me back?”

Not until he said it did she realize that was in fact exactly what she’d had in mind and it horrified her. Back? She was taking him back? After everything she’d seen today, everything she knew they were doing…

She was taking him back.

Without warning, Sarah bent over and threw up. It was more of a messy belch than anything else and it made her head hurt so much that for a moment, she thought she was going to fall over in the foamy puddle and pass out, but she didn’t. She didn’t cry either, although the strain of trying to puke made her eyes water. She’d cried over her stupid cookies, but not this.

She retched again and grabbed the van to steady herself, coughing. The alien could have run. He could have gotten away easily. He didn’t. He just watched. He wasn’t resisting.

“Get in the van,” Sarah whispered, wiping her mouth. She opened the door for him. “Please.”

He did, cringing back when Fagin came wagging over for a sniff. He sat down on the very edge of the back seat, wrists together and raised slightly, very quiet. Sarah got in and sat down beside him. She shut the door.

His antennae kept jerking, betraying his anxiety. Sarah’s head hurt; she took off her hat and rubbed tiredly at her stitches. Fagin lay down on his blanket at their feet and closed his eyes.

“Do you want to go back?” Sarah said finally. It was easier to say out loud than she imagined.

He clicked hard, looked at her, at the loose groceries all over the floor, at Fagin. Slowly, he lowered his arms, but he didn’t relax any. The sound of his palps grinding and snapping in his barely-restrained state of panic was almost more than she could bear at the end of this awful day. He thought it was a trick; it would have been, coming from anyone else. He probably thought these were the last minutes of his life, and she couldn’t think of a thing to say to convince him otherwise. She just kept talking, and hoped that he would somehow trust her.

“I don’t have a place to take you,” she admitted. “But I can drive you someplace, if you want.”

Nothing. He shifted, one hand picking at the other. His antennae kept striking the van’s roof. He was probably still pretty young…he was a bit shorter than her, sitting down. In his fourth molt, by IBI’s reckoning. There was a license number etched in his head, hard to see by parking lot lamps, but of course, no name.

“Or I could take you back inside safely,” she said. “I have a passcard for Checkpoint Seventeen. Do you know where that is?”

He nodded. Human gesture. She’d only seen the young ones nod. T’aki could nod.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. “Please. Tell me what you want me to do.”

Fagin apparently decided this was going to take a while. Grumbling, he got up to fluff his blanket and lay down again, curled tight. Soon, he was snoring. The air inside the van was stifling, a typical Kansas summer night.

“I have to go back,” said the alien suddenly.

Sarah looked away.

“My father is starving.” The alien rubbed his fingers restlessly through his mouth palps. “He cut his feet on the Heaps. Then his…his feet fell off. He can’t work anymore and I don’t know when he’ll molt next. He needs me. I have to go back. It’s been days!”

Sarah covered her face.

The alien scraped his palps anxiously, looking around, and finally said, “Please. I don’t know what you want me to say. Please!” His words were getting louder, underscored by a high-pitched, weirdly cat-like yowl. She’d heard the little ones make that sound in Cottonwood, too. He was crying. “Please, I just want to go home!”

“I’m taking you home,” she told him and there, it was official—she was IBI and it didn’t feel any different after all. She guessed she’d been one of them all along. She got up and hunched across the van to squeeze in behind the wheel. She hit her head on the roof once. It hurt like a rotten tooth.

“You forgot to put my binders on,” the alien said behind her.

“I don’t have any.”

“Should I…” He looked around again, still holding his wrists together. “What do I do?”

“Nothing.” Helplessness and self-loathing swelled and popped in her like a black bubble. She started up the engine and moved the van forward. “Have a cookie.”

He looked at the mess on the floor. Hesitantly, watching her in the rearview mirror, he bent and picked up a handful of crumbles from the mangled bag. He ate them. Ate some more. Picked up the whole bag and poured it into his open palps, choking as he devoured them. His eye fell on the burger bag. She passed it back over Fagin’s whining head and the alien took it without comment. She heard him eating, the sick gagging sounds of his mouth and throat palps tearing at the food as he stuffed it whole into his maw. He picked at the wrappings, then ate them too. Found a napkin, coughed it out.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He didn’t seem to know how to answer, so he put his wrists together again and held them up where she could see them in the mirror.

She drove in silence. She told him to get down when they came up the long road leading to Cottonwood and he did, lying on the van’s floor with his legs drawn up and Fagin’s blanket pulled over him. Fagin wasn’t happy about sharing it and draped himself possessively over the largest lump. The alien did not object.

She swiped her card and they were in. All automated. So futurific. The streets were dark and clean and mostly empty—just a few families sitting around their yards after the family barbeque, walking the family dogs, laughing at family jokes. At the checkpoint, the security guard flagged her and came out from his office to see her pass, but it was the other one, the nice one. Small favors. He gave the van’s tinted windows a cursory glance, then caught sight of her face and whistled sharply.

“I know,” she said with a sigh. “I had a little altercation in here earlier.”

“Lady, you got lucky. They showed us these videos when I signed up and this one guy? Kicked in the chest?” The guard shook his round head. “Left a hole you could put a football in, no kidding. This other video—never mind. So what are you doing here this late?”

“This little altercation of mine? I dropped my briefcase and ran out without it.”

“Oh girl, it’s gone.”

“I know,” Sarah said, forcing a weary smile. The weariness wasn’t tough to fake. “But I have to at least look for it. I’ve already had to ask for all new papers and manuals when they got dumped. How’s it going to look when I have to ask for the same stuff all over again, and by the way, can I please have a new briefcase?”

“I hear that,” he said sympathetically, passing her card back. “Want me to come help you look?”

The offer caught her by surprise. “I don’t want to get you in trouble,” she said cautiously. “I just want to go in, look around, at least be able to tell that dragon in Supplies that I tried.”

“Want the spy-light on?” he offered.

“Oh God no. I don’t want to attract any more attention than I have to. I just want to look where I was and get out before they come over and eat the tires.”

He laughed. There was not a click from the back of the van. Fagin started snoring again. The guard heard. He stuck his head in, glanced once at the heap of loose food and rumpled-up plastic bags, and then saw Fagin lying on his unwashed quilt. With the alien hiding underneath it, it looked more like a cheap, lumpy dog bed, but only that. The guard’s broad face showed no suspicion at all. “Yeah, don’t get out if you don’t have to. You got a hell of a nice hors d’oeuvre back there.”

“I should have left him at home,” said Sarah calmly, her heart pounding. “But, you know, I came over all girly and didn’t feel safe. Like a labradoodle is so much protection.”

Fagin farted in his sleep.

“Well, you come over girly again, you just give me a page, okay? 99 on your paz, and don’t wait to get swarmed. Or even just blow your horn, huh?” The guard withdrew and gave her a comforting and earnest smile. “I’ll probably hear it and get some lights on you. Usually that’s enough to scatter them. I don’t like sending in the squads if I don’t have to. They’re harmless, most of them, you know?”

“I appreciate it—” Dip her eyes at his chest. “—Larry.”

His grin widened. “No problem. You’re not going to find it, though. That case is gone and your papers are patching cracks on some bug’s wall, guaranteed, but good luck to you anyhow.” He gave the van a slap, waking Fagin to a sleepy volley of barks, and returned to the checkpoint station.

Sarah drove in through the gates and down the causeway until the lights behind her weren’t quite so bright. Aliens skittered in front of her, just beyond her headlights, darting away to vanish in the alley behind the row of homes. She navigated her way carefully down increasingly narrow streets beyond the main causeway to a dark place and parked in front of a house she didn’t know. She wasn’t alone; there was no hope of that. There were eyes all around her, watching from windows, from rooftops, from behind rusted washing machines and railroad cars.

“Do you want the food?” asked Sarah. “You can have whatever you want. Fagin, don’t be a pest. Sit down.”

The alien looked at her, hesitated, then scooped up the cans of dog food. Fagin whined, but came when she called him again and sat. The dome lights came on when he opened the door; he shut it fast and too hard. He darted into the shadows and ran off down the causeway, turned the corner, and was gone. A few calls went out, but they were not, to her human ear, the same calls warning that IBI was here. The aliens watching her did not disperse. Neither did they come closer.

Sarah drove away, making her way carefully back into her territory and then onto her causeway. There was no light in Sanford’s window when she passed his familiar house; if he was home, he was probably hiding with his son from whatever evil IBI van was cruising the streets at this hour. But when she neared Samaritan’s trailer she saw that he was up, leaning against the rails on his porch with a beer dangling from his hand, watching her. He’d taped his shell where Sanford had cracked it. The tape was reflective, glowing pink in her headlights. As she watched, because he knew she’d be watching, he raised the hand that held his beer and pointed.

Her briefcase was lying in the dirt next to an old cut-up oil drum. Sarah paused, parked, and got out. She picked it up, opened it. Untouched. She got back in the van and returned to the checkpoint gate. Samaritan watched her go, pink slashes and steady eyes in her rearview mirror.

“No kidding,” said Larry the security guard when he saw the case.

“I don’t understand it either,” she said, too tired to come up with another lie, only wanting to get away before he stuck his friendly head in and noticed how much flatter Fagin’s quilt was now.

“Once in a while, you get lucky,” Larry said, and grinned, waving her on.

‘Once in a while,’ thought Sarah, driving home. ‘Lucky me.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

She didn’t come back for two days. Sanford told himself she’d done it before, that it was normal, that it didn’t mean anything. But he worried. He knew T’aki was worried too, mostly because the boy did not ask questions.

But on the third day, as Sanford sat teasing connections together on a tricky piece of micro-circuitry—had to use picks for it and hold his breath and if he scratched the damn thing, it was no good to anyone and fifty chits as good as burnt—he heard the alarms go up: Human in Cottonwood, human coming this way, and, almost as an afterthought, IBI coming.

T’aki jumped up and ran outside. Sanford let him go. He worked through his magnifier in painstaking points of solder, all his attention fixed and steady, but he listened and after a very long time, heard the voice he’d hoped to hear…and one other, somewhat less welcome.

“Give it back!” Hers.

“I think it suits me better.” Sam’s.

“Give it back, I said!”

“Come and get it! Jump! Jump!”

“You jerk!”

Sanford snapped his palps sourly. Ten more points of solder and he could put this down awhile. Ten more points. He glanced out the window, holding his hands motionless.

Sam had something, some kind of a cloth flap, in his hand, waving it high over the human’s head while she tried to snatch at it. Once, twice. Then she gave up and turned away, her face red and angry, trying to stalk off as if she were not defeated. Not until Sam triumphantly hung the cloth flap on his head did Sanford realize it was a cap. IBI’s logo was emblazoned above the visor. He’d seen dozens of humans wearing caps like that over the years, but Sarah never had. Sanford looked back at his circuit board, thinking; on Sam, the cap was merely ridiculous, but on Sarah, it would have covered the grotesquely swollen and shaved patch of her injured scalp.

“Let go of me! Ouch! Let g-go of—ow!”

Sanford looked out the window again. Sam had Sarah by the arm and was dragging her towards his house. Sanford stood up, realized he still had the circuit board in his hand and looked at it. Scratched. Ruined. He tossed it on the floor.

“Stop it! Let go!”

“Hold still.”

“Let g—ow!”

Sanford opened the door and went outside. He clicked, heard T’aki answer aggressively right behind him, and started walking.

Sam had her flat against his outer wall, his knee pressed on her belly and one arm across her throat. He was looking at her head, at the black marks crossing the ugly scar. His thumb lightly moved over the bruises, very lightly, as Sarah struggled to free herself. She yelped when he touched her face. He came back to it, made her yelp again. His antennae flattened briefly, concerned.

“Admiring your handiwork?” she panted, pushing at him vainly. “I don’t think you even did that part.”

“Still worth admiring. Look up. Not at me, up. Oh, you’re fine.” Sam took the cap off and hung it on her head. “Big baby, squalling over nothing.”

“Do you have to be an asshole all the time?” she hissed. Her voice cracked.

“No,” said Sam mildly. “Not all the time.” He leaned back and rubbed his hand down over her chest. His fingers closed on one of her swellings. “Why don’t you come inside with me, caseworker? We’ll sit around and lick each other’s wounds.”

She retreated, both arms raised over her chest, and stumbled over her fallen case. Sam caught her before she could fall, but she fought free of him at once, slapping loudly and completely without effect at his chest plates. “You stay away from me!” she panted, once Sam released her.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Sam said, annoyed.

“You said that right before you threw me off your porch into your stupid car.” Sarah snatched up her briefcase and swung back, her skin flushed red and small hands in fists. “You also said it when you had me pinned down on your stupid table! Maybe you think that’s cute—”

“I was drunk,” Sam snapped, his antennae low and his own hands balled tight. “You never been drunk and done something dumb?”

“Are you drunk now?” she shot back. “Are you drunk right here where you’re feeling me up in the middle of the street? Don’t you ever touch me again or I’ll—”

Then her eyes darted beyond Sam to lock with Sanford’s own and whatever else she might have said fell away. She tugged at the cap until it fit over the hairless part of her head and just stood there, her head low and face bright with color.

Sam glanced once behind him, dismissing Sanford as soon as he’d seen him and turning his attention back on Sarah. “Go on, then,” he said, stepping back. “Get out of here.”

She marched away, not looking at either Sanford or T’aki as she passed them.

As soon as she was gone, T’aki flared his palps and skreed with all the shrill anger of an outraged second-molt. Sam glanced down, contemptuously amused. He shifted a foot as for a playful kick, then thought better of it and leaned against his wall instead. “Cute kid,” he said.

“Go home,” said Sanford, and, “Not you,” when Sam straightened up. He waited, staring the other down, until his son had sullenly departed, and then said, “I want you to stop touching her.”

Sam turned his head and spat chaw. “Why?”

“She doesn’t like it.”

“Lots of things I don’t like, I put up with. Besides—” Sam flashed his claspers. “—sometimes they like it.”

“Are you trying to hurt her?” Sanford asked.

Sam’s claspers tucked in. He looked surly.

“Are you trying to scare her until she stops coming back?”

“Wouldn’t that be too bad.”

“Stop touching her.”

Noise behind them. Sarah, picking her way past the burned walls of the hatchery, where they still stood at all, calling for Baccus.

“I’m not going to hurt her,” Sam said finally. “I’ve never hurt any of them.”

“Stop touching her.”

“I was checking her over, that’s all. Humans patched her together like a pair of breeches, didn’t fix a fucking thing. She needs a real medic.”

“She doesn’t need your hands on her.”

“Look, am I drilling where you’ve sprayed or what?” Sam snapped. “I’ll touch her if I want to touch her. Maybe I like the way she feels. You wouldn’t even know what to do with her.”

Sanford stared him down, his palps snapping.

Sam spat again, kicked at it. “Fine. Fuck you. Keep your little meat-sack for yourself. And keep her out of the Heaps,” he called back, walking away. “Or she’ll get an infection where those stupid humans sewed on her.”

T’aki was waiting up the road, halfway between him and Baccus’s house. He saw Sanford coming, glared after Sam, and tried to spit chaw, but was too young to produce it, really. Sanford gave him a tap to the head to discourage repeat efforts and went on past to see Sarah.

“Mr. Baccus?” she called, and tried to move the charred remains of a chair. She scraped it maybe three inches through the ash and debris, then held her blackened hands up before her eyes and stared at them. She looked around, picked her way toward a hole in the back wall and tried to look out. “Mr. Baccus?”

“Gone,” said Sanford, and T’aki echoed, “Gone.”

She looked at them. Her eyes were still wet. One of them was swollen.

“Once a home is raided, it becomes a target for the squads. Baccus won’t be back.”

“Oh.” She picked up her case, looking at it and not at him. “I was going to try to requisition some things to replace what got…burnt. And maybe go with him to the Heaps and help get stuff to cover the walls. It can’t be healthy to…to buh-breathe in all this s-soot. I have to get out of here,” she said suddenly, too loud and too fast. She started walking, stumbling through ashes and half-buried debris until she was clear of the wreckage, and then just stood, shivering in the sunlight.

She didn’t ask if he knew where Baccus had gone. He had an idea, actually. He realized he might even tell her if she asked him. He thought she probably knew it too.

“I’m going to requisition those things anyway. It’ll make it look like he’s still living here for a while. If the stuff comes through…I guess someone here will take it.” She looked up again. “Do you know someone who can make Baccus’s mark?”

“I can,” said T’aki.

“Hush. Let’s go inside,” he said to her, and she nodded and went, head down, at his side.

She sat on his chair, pulled his son onto her lap and held him as if it were the most natural thing in the world for either of them. She stared at his walls and didn’t speak.

Sanford poured water from his cache-drum into the purifier and turned it on. The sound of the filter working was very loud when there were no other sounds to compete with it. After a long time—the water was half-clean—Sarah suddenly pulled a breath and said, “I want you to go outside for a bit, jellybean. I want to talk to your Dad. Big-people talk.”

“I’m big,” protested T’aki.

“Bigger than you were, but not as big as you have to be to hear this talk. Go on now.”

“Stay close,” said Sanford, and his son went, muttering and kicking at stones.

In the dim light, Sarah looked sallow, unhealthy, scared. She stared at her hands, at his walls, and then at him.

“My community event approval came through this morning,” she said. “I should receive the funds within the next five days.”

Sanford waited.

“I still want to do it,” she said, her eyes bright and welling with pain. “I do, but…it just doesn’t seem as important as it did. What I saw…” She pressed her hands to her face, shook her head, and then dropped them and looked into his eyes. “I have to get you out of here.”

The words fell out of her and landed, broken, between them. It hurt more than he would have thought. “Don’t say things like that,” Sanford said, rubbing at the plates between his eyes until they hurt, too. “Just…don’t.”

“I have to.” Her voice shook, but she kept talking. “As many as you think will come. I’ve been looking at the van. I think I can hold…maybe six of you? More, if they’re…small.”

Sanford said nothing.

“The windows are tinted,” she told him hurriedly, hopelessly. “So as long as no one’s looking straight in through the windshield, no one should be able to tell you’re…what you are. And we can drive at night.”

The purifier popped softly, its timer completed.

“I don’t have a place to take you, but it’s…it’s a big planet and they can’t be everywhere. Maybe they won’t even notice you’re gone. How could they notice everyone when they…” She passed a hand over her eyes and made herself look at him again. “When they’re killing you.”

He looked away.

“Are they killing you?” she whispered. Her whole body begged him to tell her no, that the world was still a sane place, that there were only small miseries, and that people were all essentially good. Please.

He said, “Yes.”

She held his gaze one second, two, and then trembled over into her hands and began to weep. Sanford, deeply unsettled, clicked for his son, heard an answering rattle close by, and poured the woman a cup of water.

“I can’t drink that,” she sobbed. “It’s all you have.”

“Drink it,” he said, in the same tone he used to tell T’aki to go to sleep at night.

She drank, holding the cup in both hands.

Sanford sat down. He watched her, he clicked to keep his son close, and he listened as he always listened, for IBI to come. He realized he trusted her. He realized he’d trusted her for some time. He said, “Stand up.”

She did, sniffing and wiping at her face.

He moved her aside, pushed the chair away, pulled up the rug. She watched him open the hidden hatch with wet, incurious eyes. He put his hands on his knees and looked at her. “Down, please.”

She knelt.

He pointed at the hole. “Down. Please.”

She hesitated, hugging her cup, then set it aside, unfolded her legs and dropped down. He joined her, found the hand-light and switched it on.

The first things she saw, as he’d known she would, were the guns. He heard her gasp, then saw her clap a hand over her mouth so that she could not betray herself with sound again. Sixteen IBI rifles stood in a rack on the wall, alongside fifty boxes of ammunition. Packed in around them anywhere they would fit were two yang’ti pulsars, two disruptors and one annihilator. Perhaps the largest cache of yang’ti weapons in yang’ti hands on Earth. Certainly the largest in Cottonwood. But this was not what he wanted her to see.

There were several shelves stacked deep with canned food and impure water, a box of tablets, an extra purifier, and batteries of every kind. There were boxes filled with food-chits, even a packet of human money, just in case. Not even Sam knew he had that. None of this was important either. He picked up the one thing that was and gave it to her.

It didn’t look like much. A round, metal device, heavier than it appeared, black and grey, with dark panels, lifeless in her hands.

“What is it?” she whispered, her eyes huge.

“It’s a key,” he told her quietly. “My son and I are leaving.”

* * *

It took some explaining, which he did up top, the hatchway hidden and his son playing on the floor between them. The ship was a colony transport, to begin with. Its cargo, primarily civilian, partly support, including military support, as he was.

“You’re a soldier?” she asked.

He hesitated. “Of a sort. My specialty is in threat-assessment. Please, may I go on?”

The navigations systems had failed. This, humans had already surmised. But they had failed long before their ill-fated arrival on Earth. The colonists and crew, sleeping out their ten-year trip to the empty world they hoped to seed, had been awakened by the ship’s failsafe alarms only after they had been careening blindly through the galaxy for three years. The ship, spinning madly at the threshold of—

“Of what?”

Sanford clicked helplessly and spread his hands. There was only so much the translator could do.

He and several others had managed, after a terrifying interlude, to slow the engines before they ruptured, but the other repairs, the greater repairs, required considerably more time, and meanwhile, other systems, stressed by three years’ unchecked overuse, were on the cusp of explosive failure. They had to stop.

“Why not stop in space?” she asked, which was a fair and intelligent question.

“We were afraid our life-support systems would fail. In that event, best to have come to a planet capable of supporting us. Your Earth was nearest.”

“But wait…I mean, I know I studied this once in school, and, like, the nearest star to Earth is still four or five light-years away. How could you—”

“Light-years are…?”

“The distance light can travel in one of our years. And the speed of light is supposed to be as fast as anyone can go.”

Sanford clicked again, relieved. “Excellent. You grasp that. Yes, there are ways to circumvent the light-speed barrier to space travel.”

“There are?” And her face, pinched by unhappiness and dread all this while, slipped gently into wonder.

His heart throbbed. He looked down, as if surprised enough to want to see it, then up again. “Using those methods, we were able to reach your world in a little less than two months from our position in space. And once the cartography system had been repaired, we saw that while we were far off-course, frighteningly off-course, we were not entirely lost, thank Ko’vi. Once our ship is repaired, our engines at maximum efficiency, we could conceivably be home in less than two of your years.”

“That’s incredible!”

“Our world has three moons,” T’aki said, climbing up onto his lap.

“Yes,” Sanford agreed, patting him. “Three moons. And a yellow sun, like Earth’s. The oxygen levels of your atmosphere are somewhat low, but still breathable. It was in many ways an ideal destination, particularly in the emergency we found ourselves. But it was inhabited.”

They crashed through a shell of blatting satellites and transmitters to skip over the blue world’s surface as a stone over a pond. He’d been afraid, he remembered, of going right around the damn thing six or eight times, picking up unstoppable momentum on each revolution, until they were thrown off and into the gravitational grip of the sun. But no, they’d managed once more to slow and stop the engines, and, as if in divine punctuation to their premature relief, the instant the ship had stopped, the emergency systems failed and expelled every last one of the escape pods into the sea.

There was no way to leave the ship now. The failing, deteriorating ship.

“The beacons weren’t working,” Sanford said. “We had stopped the engines, only to discover that we couldn’t start them again, not even to move us over land where we might have some chance of surviving should the hover-drive fail and drop us. We were only two years’ hard flight from home, but no one knew to look for us or rescue us. With every colonist and crewman awake—breathing, drinking, passing waste—our life-support systems began to show strain. Anyone who could hold a diagnostic scanner was working. All shifts, every second. It was—” He stopped there, rubbed at his son’s seams. “It was a bad time.”

“We wondered why nothing happened right away,” Sarah said. “Why nobody came out. You were trying to hold the ship up. But…looking at how things turned out, I realize this is going to sound stupid, but why didn’t you ask for help?”

“No one had expected to encounter an alien civilization in the course of our mission, let alone one so advanced. On a diplomatic level, none of us had the authority to negotiate treaties or trade agreements. On a military level, asking for help meant admitting that we needed it and placing our lives in the hands of an unknown power. No. Our only objective in those first days was to fix the ship just enough to get off the planet before anyone knew we were there.”

“We knew you were there before you even stopped. I mean…” She puffed out a puzzled sort of laugh, gesturing vaguely upwards. “We saw you!”

“I know. But when no one came immediately, we dared to hope you did not possess the technology to locate us. In any event, the ship’s repair was our greatest priority, in specific, life-support. To that end, we moved everyone into the cargo holds and shut down life-support on the upper decks. We moved the cargo anywhere it would fit to make room for everyone. We moved far more than we had to. It was make-work, to keep the civilians occupied, make them think they were helping…but in retrospect, it was the most crucial thing we did.”

And then the humans came. Every day, more of them appeared in their floating cities and crude airships, during which time, he and the other military personnel had plenty of opportunities to figure out what to do about it. His specialty was threat-assessment; he saw a damned lot of threat.

“We can’t kill them,” he’d said, because the pervading argument had been to do just that. “We can’t kill even one of them. They’ll swarm us, they’ll shoot us down. We don’t know anything about their technology.”

“We know they can’t open a door.”

“That doesn’t mean they can’t shoot us down!”

“They’ll swarm us even faster if we offer no resistance. We’re hopelessly outnumbered out there. Here, we can hold them off.”

“Not indefinitely,” Sanford said, before he had been Sanford. He had been Nk’os’a’knko then, son of an ancient House, officer of the Tes’xrian guard. He gave orders and was obeyed. The man who would someday be living in a metal crate, letting his son piss in a ditch while he rebuilt alien entertainment devices to sell for greasy bones—the man who would be Sanford—was unimaginable to him. “They are coming,” Nk’os’a’knko said, frustrated with his inability to convince them, with the need to convince them at all. “And if they have to cut their way in, they’ll do it and we’ll lose the integrity of the hull and be stranded here! Unless we can get this ship back into space right now, today, we’d better open up and talk to them.”

He’d been roundly refused. They were in no position to negotiate, even if some sort of communication could be managed, and they absolutely were not going to initiate contact with an alien race by asking for aid and refuge. They were yang’ti.

Nk’os’a’knko left them arguing and started breaking down weapons. His specialty was threat assessment. He knew they were going to need them and need them in disguise.

Soon after that, the gunship came. So it was either argue and be broken or open and be damned. Commander Tlee’tathk called his senior officers to him and gave his last orders. The ship’s systems were set to automatic-cycle and locked down. All doors were sealed and armed. It was Tlee’tathk who produced the code-bank and placed it in Nk’os’a’knko’s hands. “When the time comes,” he’d said, “and the last hope is ended, do not hesitate to destroy it.”

There was a final speech, during which the warnings which were soon to become law were heard and agreed upon. As the humans built their scaffolds, Commander Tlee’tathk led his people in prayer and then he opened the ship. And the monsters came.

Sarah smiled weakly.

“They were, you know,” Sanford said. “Especially in those first moments. The suits they wore…shiny and formless and faceless. The first thought I was able to make was of…monsters made of white clay. We could hear them speak, but they had no mouths, only voices that seemed to come from nowhere. They came for us, with the light from their world behind them…and no one knew what to do. No one fought them.” He knew he should stop there, but the words seemed to come out on their own: “No one escaped.”

Sarah looked away, pretending to be distracted as T’aki swooped his toy ship up over one arm of the green chair, along the back, and down the other side.

“I don’t say this to hurt you.”

“I know.” She visibly braced herself and turned back to him again. “I’m not complaining. All I have to do is hear it. You were the one who had to live it. Go on.”

They were evacuated to the boats, if one could call that chaotic mess an evacuation. The humans were trying to help themselves to their technology, taking everything that wasn’t bolted down and unbolting it if it was. The sealed doors could not be opened and gave off a lethal synaptic shock when the humans tried to cut through them, so the rest of the ship was safe, but the hold itself was emptied.

“Down to the panels on the walls,” said Sanford grimly. “They used us to do the stripping. We were stronger, of course, and we could work the tools. All of our technology is keyed. It requires a code to operate even a standard console, let alone a weapon. Most of the civilians couldn’t even open a door if it was locked.”

“That’s threat assessment in action,” said Sarah, and he chuckled wearily.

“It was intended to keep our weapons out of civilian hands, but yes. Our histories are violent ones. It has not made us trusting…thank Ko’vi. In any event, the humans took most of it, but in the chaos—you cannot imagine the chaos—many of us were able to hide things away internally.”

Sarah, doubtless recalling the size of the weapons hidden in the crawlspace, gave him a dubious frown.

For reply, Sanford reached into a crate of mechanical parts below his work table and came up with two pieces that were, together, roughly equal to a yang’ti disrupter. “First, they must be dismantled,” he said, and before her astonished eyes, he tipped back his head and swallowed them. “As for the firing pin—” he went on calmly, and pried up part of his abdominal plating. He slid an assortment of small plastic and metal objects from around the table between his chitin and his skin, and looked at her, hands spread.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” she asked, looking uncomfortable.

“Yes.” He removed the smaller pieces, coughed up the larger ones, and tossed everything back onto the table, adding dryly, “And hiding places are not infinite. Yet I managed one whole weapon and part of the code-bank. Of course, we were all searched when they took us off the boats, but by then, I’d had nearly sixty days to make such a search as unpleasant as possible. They found only a few things.”

“He peed on everything,” T’aki said eagerly. He’d been told this story and in particular relished that aspect of it. “And spat chaw and threw up everywhere.”

Sanford hushed him and the boy ran at once to Sarah, who picked him up. Her face had gone pink.

“After a very brief inspection, I arrived in the first camp, Fairfield, where I was able to bring out my salvage and do what I could with it. I’ve been moved several times since then, but so far, they’ve always been willing to let me move my possessions as long as I bribe them. I’m very good at hiding things, and besides—” He waved an arm at the electronics that covered his wall. “—most humans don’t seem to know the difference between their technologies and ours, if I break it down small enough. Most of the weapons you saw, and all the human ones, I’ve had since I lived at Fairfield. But the important thing, the only thing, was the code-bank.”

“I can’t…” She shook her head, her brows pinched. “My translator isn’t getting that word. What does it do?”

“It’s a security device,” he said. “Every codekey for every door, every operating system, every last lock on the ship is stored here. With this, I can seal the hold, move the ship out of Earth’s reach, finish the repairs, and get back to my people.” He looked at his son, curled comfortably on the human’s lap. “I had a long time on the boat to think of…oh, revolutions and seizing airships and useless fantasies of that sort. I wasn’t long in Fairfield before I knew I could never…never save us all.”

It was the first time he had ever said the words out loud, and hearing them made him feel selfish and small and never mind how true they were. The cold mathematics of this had always been a surrender of sorts, but not his own; he felt now, as he always felt when he thought of this, the accusing weight of every yang’ti who shared this world with him pressing in. Some masochistic urge made him continue, say it all: “And when I had finally swallowed that, I came to realize that every person I attempt to take with me when I do go over that wall exponentially lessens my odds of success.”

‘Even my son,’ he wanted to say, but those words stuck in his throat and would not be spoken.

Sarah looked down at the boy, as if she heard them anyway.

“I cannot allow anything to matter more than getting back to my people,” Sanford said, “because someone has got to tell them what has happened to us. I can’t save us, I can’t fight, I can’t help anyone…all I can do is go home and tell someone what is happening here.”

“I know,” she said.

He looked at her, breathing hard, his hands in fists, and believed her, oddly. He believed that she did know, that she understood and agreed, and at that moment, as ridiculous as it was, he felt the burden of it all ease. Not vanish…but ease.

“Well,” she said at last. Her eyes were troubled, solemn. “I don’t know how I’m going to get you up to the ship, but I guess IBI might have an airlift or something we can hijack when we get there. I’ll help you, Sanford. When do you want to leave?”

Just like that. His heart throbbed. He stood up and paced around his work table, looking at the bits and pieces of human technology lining his walls. “It is not so simple. The code-bank is not functional yet. When I took it—” His words caught in his throat, bitter as chaw. He said them anyway. “I had the choice to take an entire weapon and half the code-bank, or the whole code-bank and half a weapon. I took the weapon.”

“And the captain took the other half?” Sarah guessed.

“No. Commander Tlee’tathk took nothing. He surrendered himself to the humans as our leader and they took him into their custody, as surely he knew they would. I have not seen him since.”

Silence. He looked at her and saw her hand on his unfeeling arm. His heart throbbed again. He touched her briefly, then stepped away and stroked his son’s seams instead. “I took the code chips. And some of the more essential parts. The rest, I gave to another soldier. A…friend.”

His name had been M’orr’ak and although they had not met before accepting their doomed colony mission, they were of the same House and therefore very distantly related. The days when caste mattered were long, long gone, but it was enough to get them talking and, talking, they had found in one another that rare blend of familial good feeling and irreverent camaraderie. By the time they boarded the ship itself, they were brothers, just the same as the sons of his father, and thinking of him still brought a pang to Sanford’s heart. He had given M’orr’ak the rest of the code-bank’s parts to swallow and hide beneath his plates and M’orr’ak had done so without hesitation, joking that this would be the last order he followed for a while, that he had a feeling once the humans came, he would no longer be a soldier. But when they were taken down to the boats, M’orr’ak found it in him to be a soldier just once more, enough to protest the rough-handling of the colonists he saw being separated from their families. The humans ordered him back in line. M’orr’ak resisted.

He was shot, the first of them to be shot. Nk’os’a’knko saw his head opened by simple human projectile pellets, laughably crude. He saw his brother’s slack body thrown over the rails and into the sea. All his mourning was stained with thoughts of the code-bank and for that, not-yet-Sanford hated for the first time in his life. He hated humans. He hated this mission. He hated himself.

“He died,” Sanford said now. One word in his own speech. Only two in Sarah’s. It was not fair. “Nearly half the controller’s parts were lost to me. For twenty years, I have salvaged minutiae to rebuild it—sometimes as little as a wire or a single fastener. I have managed to piece most of it back together, but I still require three parts.”

She did not ask foolish questions. Three yang’ti parts could take another twenty years to find, if ever, and she knew it.

“They are absurdly basic parts,” he went on. “I could find them in a child’s toy, if I had one. Unfortunately, most of the pieces that come to me—that come to anyone after all this time—have been stripped of them, because they are such basic needs. So we will wait. As for how to board the ship, if your people have recovered one of the escape pods, I could pilot it.”

“I know they made a lot of dives,” she said. “But if they ever found anything like an escape pod, they never said so. Just a lot of other stuff…” She thought hard, only to shake her head. “But I have no idea where they’re keeping it. I’ve never seen any of the salvage, except some on TV and those were all guns. I guess if you could get the parts you need off guns, you’d be gone by now.”

“Yes.”

“But IBI does own the salvage rights.” Sarah glanced back over her shoulder, as if she could see through the wall, through all the walls, between her and whatever lay beyond the tall, stone borders of Cottonwood. “And they have a research and development department here. I could sneak in and look around.”

She offered with the same reckless optimism that she’d had when first telling him of her plan to feed five hundred yang’ti against IBI’s orders.

“Have you any experience in such things?” Sanford asked cautiously.

“Well, no, but I could at least look. If they catch me snooping, I’m sure I can talk my way out of it.”

She believed it. She really did.

She saw his incredulity. Moreover, she recognized it. And still, she said, “They can’t do anything to me, Sanford. In here, with you, that’s one thing, but not even IBI can make humans disappear without consequences.”

“Are you certain?” he asked quietly.

She opened her mouth to dismiss the idea…and then slowly closed it again. She thought, frowning. “Pretty sure,” she said at last, but said it in a small, uncertain voice.

“Do not go looking for this…research department,” he told her. “If you are caught there, even if they do nothing in retaliation—” Damned unlikely. “—they will surely suspect you. After the burning of Baccus’s house—”

“Baccus’s babies,” she corrected harshly and then looked away. Her hands moved, rubbing T’aki’s back. After a long, uncomfortable silence, she bent her neck and said, “I just want to help. I don’t want to be one of them, Sanford. You have no idea…I just want to make it right.”

He reached out impulsively and touched her arm. She had no joints for his fingers to dip along. All her body was receptive to him, he thought then, and bizarrely, the thought embarrassed him. He withdrew his hand.

T’aki looked at him, then at her. He pulled up his legs and giggled.

“Bring the food,” Sanford said. “For the…the…”

“Block party,” she said tonelessly, and nodded. “Yeah, it’s not much, but I guess it’s about what I can do. You don’t think it’s ghoulish, though? So soon after…after Baccus?”

Such things happened here every day, but he could not bring himself to say so. Perhaps she saw it in his eyes. Her own dimmed a little. She set the boy down and opened her briefcase. She handed him some forms. “For Baccus’s mark,” she said.

He made it.

“I don’t know if it’ll do any good, really, but if you happen to see him around anywhere, just…tell him I’m so sorry.”

“Your feelings are known.” Oh hell, he touched her again, her hand this time, which seemed more appropriate. “Take care they are not too well known.”

She smiled for him, took back her papers and her hand, and left his house.

Sanford went to the window and watched long enough to be certain Sam would not make a nuisance of himself, and then sat down again at his work table. Broken machines stared him down. He had just told a human that he meant to escape and how he meant to do it. In one hour, the caution of nearly twenty years had been undone.

“She’s coming back,” chirped T’aki, climbing up onto his work table to watch her go through the window.

“As often as she can,” Sanford agreed.

“She likes us.”

“Yes.”

“She likes me best.”

“Because you are wonderful,” he said by rote. “Go and play. Stay close.”

T’aki took his toy ship and ran out into the sunshine. Sanford sat a while longer, then heaved a sigh, took up his tools, and got back to work.

CHAPTER NINE

Strange, how the world could move on even when it had been shaken to its foundations. Sanford could remember vividly cracking the plates over his forearm during the ship’s near-crash into this planet and how that ridiculously insignificant little pain had asserted itself over the days that followed, while the ship hung dying in the air and humans gathered in their gunships below. He could remember sitting in the cramped cell on the human’s boat with seven other strangers, M’orr’ak dead not even an hour and his body swollen with weapon parts and his useless code-bank, and being hungry. The body doesn’t care that it may die tomorrow, it only wants what it needs to keep running today.

So Sanford worked. After taking a human into his secret bunker and showing her the code-bank, speaking openly of escape, he went right back to work like none of it had ever happened. He went to the Heaps and salvaged whatever he could to repair toys, industrial equipment, and kitchen aids, and sold them for chits. The higher-quality merchandise, he sold back to the humans, who paid him with better food, soap, tools, medical supplies, and sometimes money. They laughed at him when they gave him money, knowing he couldn’t spend it, but what can’t be spent can only accrue and Sanford had learned long ago the value of human currency changes when it is offered in quantity and in secret.

He saw Sarah nearly every day, either in passing out on the Heaps, or at home. Without consciously thinking about it, he attuned himself to her habits, so that at the end of her shift, when she was likeliest to come to his house, he was there to let her in. They did not speak of escape pods or IBI or Cottonwood when she came. She played with T’aki and complained about the weather and said admiring things when she watched Sanford work and that was it. Their time together was understandably brief—she had many other clients to see each day—and ordinary, and it was the ordinariness he missed most when she left.

So the days passed. He ate because he was hungry. He slept because he was tired. He went to Sam’s house sometimes after T’aki was in bed to drink ferment and share that crude company because he was on edge and lonely. That was how the world turned, one day at a time.

And so, in what had become routine for both of them after what was, realistically, a dangerously short length of time, when Sanford heard the distinctive sound of Sarah’s van grumbling down the causeway toward him, he opened his door without coming all the way out of the television he was working on. She was smiling when she entered and took her usual seat on the green chair. She was also limping.

His first thought was to go and crack the chitin on Sam’s head again. She read it in his face and laughed.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” she said.

He turned his attention back to the television. “What am I thinking?”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure it isn’t that I slipped in the ShopALot bread aisle. They had, like, an inch of wax on the floor. I was flying past the tortillas before I even hit the ground. Where’s T’aki?”

“At school.”

“You have a school here? That’s great!”

“No,” he said. “But I know someone who cannot work the Heaps and who can teach my son to make his letters and do his sums. He’s young for it, but he seems ready.”

“He’s smart.”

“I’m not a fair judge.” Sanford carefully traded out a damaged circuit board. “But yes, he is. And he will be handsome. And when he molts twice more and realizes these things, he’ll probably be insufferable for several years. I know I was.”

She laughed, then sighed and picked up one of T’aki’s toys—not the Fortesque Freeship, which was still in its place of honor in their shared sleeping space, but the yellow-haired human doll that usually piloted it. “You know, I’ve been meaning to ask…Is there another word that I could be using instead of ‘he’ or ‘him’ or ‘boy’?”

Sanford tensed and looked at her.

“I mean,” she went on, blushing, “I realize that it’s easier for humans to use those kinds of words, but I don’t think it’s right to be inflicting our gender bias on you when you don’t have a gender. So if there’s another word that’s less offensive, I’ll use it. I don’t click very well,” she admitted with a nervous laugh, “but I could try.”

Sanford picked up his tools and looked at the television. It was the paramount rule, the paramount warning. No human must know.

“I’m picking up a lot of your language, actually,” she said after a moment, no longer laughing, but trying gamefully to converse. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to speak it, but I understand a lot more than I thought I did, which I know because I’ve managed to leave my translator at home like three times now. Mr. van Meyer says we can shower and sleep in them, and sometimes I do, but they don’t always stay clipped where they’re supposed to.”

He had already told her he meant to escape, to leave Earth, to betray this world’s existence to his people. How much less did he trust her now?

“So I’ve left it in the bathroom twice and once it just fell off. I found it in the bottom of my coffee cup after I got home, which was great because that was the one thing I absolutely did not want to have to order a new one of. But the bright side is that I’ve come to work three times without a translator and I bet you can’t even tell me which three days, can you?”

It was one thing to tell her about the code-bank. If IBI learned of it, they could only kill him and T’aki. To betray the truth of yang’ti was to betray all yang’ti. It could change everything.

“Sanford?” she said in a small voice. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No.” He put his tools down again, but did not look at her just yet. “We have gender.”

“What?”

“We have gender. Male and female.” He glanced around; she seemed stunned. So was he, to no small degree. “It was decided that we should keep this secret. The population controls…we feared that if it were known, our women would be gathered together and destroyed.”

“Oh.” It was not a sound of understanding, but of one receiving a hard blow.

“There are very few females among us. A handful to every thousand births. It would be so easy to destroy us.” He touched his tools, then turned and looked at her. “But we have gender. T’aki is my son. I am a man.”

And why did he phrase it that way, he wondered at once. Why not, ‘I am male’?

She met his gaze, troubled. “Baccus…is a woman?”

“Yes.”

“No wonder she ran.” Sarah stared away out the window. “She must have been terrified. And you could be right…about what would happen if…if they knew. I’ll never tell, Sanford.”

But he knew that already, didn’t he?

He started in on the television again. A man, he’d said.

“Have you got the tables?” she asked finally.

“Yes. When do you need them?”

“Sunday.”

So soon. He clicked, thinking, but she seemed to misread his troubled silence, because she hurriedly added, “That’s the day after tomorrow, I mean. Around four, four-thirty. I’d love to do it tomorrow, but there’s just too much to do.” She managed a laugh, but it was too strained for real humor. “I’ve done half the shopping already. Getting buns was what killed me in the ShopALot and it didn’t even occur to me until after that, you know, do you even eat bread?”

“Yes.”

“Oh good. Mr. Samaritan said something about bread once, but I wasn’t sure.”

Sanford snapped his palps and then snapped them again because he’d snapped them at all. “Meat is all the humans seem to think we need,” he said, savagely soldering a wire. “Perhaps it is meant to keep us malnourished.”

Silence. She looked at the case in her hands.

“We eat a little grain,” he said, more gently. “Whenever we can find it. And vegetation. Very small amounts sustain us normally, but we have been for many years deprived.”

“Well, I bought some. For the hamburgers. And I got some chips too, they were on sale. And cookies. And lots of soda. I know you guys like beer, but there’s no way I could float bringing alcohol for my clients if I ever get called on this, so I decided I’d better not.”

“That is best.” It was likely to be stressful enough without half the attendees getting drunk.

He finished setting wires, rebuilt the guts, turned the set around and plugged it in. He left the backing off for now, but when he switched the monitor on, the screen slowly bled to color and sound came through the speakers. He clicked, pleased.

“It’s so amazing to watch you do that,” she murmured from behind him. “I can’t even program my coffee machine.”

“I could teach you,” he said, and had to wonder at himself.

“I guess if you can fly a spaceship, fixing a TV is pretty small potatoes.”

“It isn’t quite the same thing.”

“No, I guess it’s not, but it’s still amazing that you can do it at all. I mean, it’s alien technology, isn’t it?”

“Of a primitive sort,” he agreed.

“Did you used to build stuff on your planet?”

“I took a standard mechanics and engineering course in preparation for this mission, but beyond some small home repairs, no.”

“You’re awfully good at it.”

“I’ve had time and practice.”

She was quiet as she watched him unplug the device and put the shell on, ready now to sell. Then she sighed. “I wish I was more useful.”

He looked at her, startled. She was staring out the window, lost in her own thoughts, wistful.

“I wasted my life. Didn’t do so well in school, didn’t go to college…I can’t help thinking that someone who actually did something with her life would be better for you now. The only work I’ve ever done is custodial, fast food and a little cashiering. And look at me. I come to Cottonwood and all I can think of to do is clean up, flip burgers, and rob the boss’s till.” She shook her head and sighed again. “You deserve better.”

“There is no one better.”

She looked at him, pained.

“There is no one better,” he said again, drumming in each word with hard clicks.

They stared at each other in the dim and stuffy room.

He stood up, and for a long, dizzying moment, had no idea what he was about to do. Then he said, “I have to fetch my son,” and it cemented into truth, leaving him feeling somewhat disorientated.

“Oh. Okay. I just wanted to let you know. Remember: Sunday, around four.” She stood up and gathered her case, but paused just outside and looked back at him.

For no reason at all, he thought she would come back inside. For no reason at all, he thought she might touch him. For no reason at all, he thought of Sam flashing his claspers and making that obscene comment about pushing her down, getting inside.

“Tell T’aki I’m sorry I missed him today,” she said. “And I’ll see him Sunday.”

“Yes.”

She lingered.

“Is there something else?” he asked.

She came back half a step, only half. “What’s your name, Sanford?” she asked softly.

His heart gave a pang, not quite a throb, disturbing. “You couldn’t pronounce it.”

“I could try.”

“Nk’os’a’knko,” he said, slowly, hopelessly.

She blinked several times. Her lips worked in silence, then fell into a defeated smile. “I can’t pronounce that,” she said.

“I know.” And when she turned around, heard himself blurt, “I like to hear you call me Sanford.”

“It’s a joke.”

“Not when you say it.”

“Sanford.” She flashed him a sad smile and walked away.

He watched her go, in no great hurry either to collect his son or to deliver her message. The sun turned the top of her yellow hair to white. The wind blew it back and forth across the dark scar near her ear. ‘I told her I was a man,’ he thought. ‘Not a male.

‘A man.’

It bothered him. He turned away before she was entirely gone and went quickly down the path.

O’bek’we held lessons four rows south of the Heap-station. The smell was strong, but the wind was with him today and it was tolerable enough. He stood outside the crude tent where O’bek’we made his school, knowing he was very early, thinking of the human, watching the children settle in a half-circle around their legless teacher. Afternoon lessons were just starting.

“In the beginning, all was emptiness and Ko’vi.” O’bek’we reached out to tap T’aki, who had hunkered off by himself and looked bored. “And Ko’vi commanded light and set it apart from darkness.”

Sanford watched his son draw in the dirt, trying not to show disapproval. He had understood that lessons would be useful subjects only, reading and writing, making numbers, the basic scientific tenets. Talk of Ko’vi was best reserved for home.

“He filled the universe with suns and from them spun orbs of substance to revolve around them, but the emptiness remained, for Ko’vi was alone. And so He passed among the many orbs and mounted them, and they became as eggs—” And this was exactly why. Sanford forced his antennae higher and kept quiet. “—and hatched from His seed into worlds teeming with life, but yang’Tak was that which He loved best and made its children in His own image.”

One of the young ones raised a hand, a human request for speech. “Does Ko’vi hate humans?” he asked.

O’bek’we clicked reprovingly. “Ko’vi hates none of His children.”

“But if He likes one best, He must like one least. Is it humans?”

‘Yes,’ thought Sanford. ‘Dig out of that.’

O’bek’we decided to notice him. “T’aki, your father.”

The boy looked around, then leapt up with embarrassing speed and ran to him. Sanford paid the young man who did the teacher’s walking, and took his son away, leaving O’bek’we to drone on once more about Ko’vi and His great works in the age of creation. He told himself not to think too harshly of the curriculum. He might feel differently if he were more religious, and certainly belief in a benevolent and watchful god made a heart-lifting contrast to the reality of the camps.

It didn’t seem right to teach children not to look too closely at reality.

Of course, given that reality, it wasn’t right to have children in the first place.

“Did you enjoy school?” he asked, hoping his mood didn’t show in his tone.

“It was okay.” T’aki ran ahead to dig through a small heap of empty cans at the side of the road. “We did numbers and looked at pictures of fish. Are there fish on our world?”

“Not exactly, but there is life in our world’s waters.”

“Fish swim. Can we swim?”

“No.”

“None of us?”

“None.”

“Humans can. We saw pictures of that with the fish. Can Sarah swim?”

“You’d have to ask her.”

But now she was back in his mind and restless energy continued to bite at him. He did not want to go home yet. He watched his son scramble through another little pile of trash, and then decided to go crawl the Heaps for a while. T’aki was delighted by what was, for him, a treat. For two hours, the boy filled boxes with scrap metal and papers while Sanford mostly just watched. His son. Clever and fated to inherit the good looks of his bloodline. Honest, so far. And maybe it was still true that he should have never had a son, but he could not help but be proud.

When the bell rang to call them in, he sold what little T’aki had so proudly gathered and dug into his pockets to pay for two showers. T’aki protested, he always did, but stood with great tolerance under the spout and let Sanford soap and scrub his chitin. Afterwards, still oddly reluctant to go home, he splurged and traded fifty credits for a sheep’s head, and took it to a communal fire to cook.

He didn’t know anyone at the fire by name, not Earth-name and not true-name, but the company was good. T’aki was bored, but fairly well-behaved, and endured the frequent cursing and chaw-spitting without emulating it. One of the others had a can of beer and passed it in exchange for the sheep’s tongue. The beer was warm, but still alive, sour but good. Sanford took four swallows, gave T’aki one, and thought of Sarah.

Restless. Too restless.

Night fell. The figures at the fire came and went. The company was still good, but not enough. It occurred to Sanford that he wanted to be touched. He picked up his son—sleepy with food, T’aki curled against his chest and drew up small, chirring—and felt immediately better.

His son. He touched the small face, slipped his fingers along the neck joint, brushed at the flicking palps. His son. His family.

An hour passed. Maybe two. They talked of the weather and other camps they had been transferred from. They complained about their neighbors and the garbage and the stink. Now and then, some bitter mention was made of humans and chaw was spat. Now and then, quiet mention was made of those who had been killed, who mutilated, who had simply been taken away and never returned. Not much. When these things are all around, it does no good to stir up talk.

T’aki fell asleep. Sanford watched his antennae twitch as he dreamed. He bent once to share breath, and then was embarrassed because the other men at the fire stopped talking to watch him. He felt conspicuous and lonely.

“I think I know you,” one of them said suddenly. “Down by the water-wall where the eggs were burnt this last ten-span?”

“Yes?” Sanford glanced up. He didn’t recognize the old man addressing him.

“You know the little yellow-head who comes out that way? The caseworker?”

“Isn’t that the stupidest thing yet?” another one grumbled, and spat chaw. “I have one, apparently.”

“We all do,” said a third.

“What for?”

“For watching us, that’s what for. I pissed on mine. He hasn’t been back.”

Another beer was passed.

“Yellow-head is strange,” the old man remarked. He coughed out a bit of bone from his own meal, looked at it, and ate it again.

“They’re all strange.”

“Are you talking about Hummer?” the third asked, and did a remarkably good imitation of Sarah’s distracted, off-key singing, enough to make T’aki stir and mumble in his sleep. “Hell, I’ve seen her. All smiles and sunshine and singing her songs.” He drank his beer, crushed the can, tossed it at the fire. “At first anyway. Not so much anymore.”

No. Not so much anymore. Sanford touched his son’s hand, moving the tiny fingers so that they touched his receptor pads in return.

“I almost feel bad for her,” the third remarked.

Another man at the fire recoiled, buzzing harshly. “What in fuck’s name for?”

“She reminds me of me,” the third answered, staring at the fire. “When it all started to sink in. She’s got that same look, every day I see her, like her chitin’s cracking open, every day a little more. I hate seeing that.”

Stunned silence.

“Why?” someone finally asked.

“Because I hate humans. And you could almost believe that one knows what’s going on here. You could almost believe it’s killing her to see it. And when you see it on her—” He spat chaw into the fire. It sizzled and smoked. “—it all comes back to you.”

They all thought about that until the third one shifted and looked irritably around. “Why the hell are we talking about Hummer anyway? Who started that piss-talk?”

“I did,” said the old man. “She brought Ni’ak’we back. After the black van took him away, she brought him back. With food. She’s going to get herself killed,” he added, as Sanford and the others buzzed at this astonishing news. “If you see her, tell her to tuck her yellow head in before one of her human friends bites it off. She might listen. Probably not.” He stood up, stretching out his aged joints to lubricate them, and limped away. Someone else came to the fire. Talk began again, this time about the storms so common to this area.

He’d ought to go home.

Brought Ni’ak’we back. Sanford didn’t know who that was, but ‘brought back’ implied whoever it was had been out. Brought him back. With food.

Sarah.

Sanford got up and left the fire. He started for home, then changed his mind, not without a dull sense of disquiet. He knew of a place—he’d never been, but he knew of it—and he went there now, under darkness, with his son in his arms. Because he didn’t know what else to do. His thoughts would not lie still and he wanted to be touched.

It was bigger than he thought it would be: an amalgam of trailers and modular storage sheds, all pushed together with crudely-fashioned roofs and side-rooms built on to make it all one shelter. A yard had been enclosed with chain fence for the children, many of whom were up and loudly playing even at this hour, under electric lights. There were a number of women lounging outside, washing clothes, drinking, cooking, watching the children, or just talking. Some of them were playing a game, one Sanford didn’t know, with a large red ball and a netted hoop, leaping and punching indiscriminately at each other in great enjoyment while small crowds of men watched and cheered. The smell of sex was eye-stinging.

They pissed on the outer walls, of course. To advertise. The piss baked in the sun, corroded the metal, and the female pheromones turned the whole thing a screaming shade of blue. Sanford could feel his belly-flaps warming, wanting to relax. His claspers swept the air beyond his control, gathering scent in hungry flutters.

T’aki woke up, his own immature claspers twitching. He rubbed at his eyes and looked around, confused.

One of the females overseeing the yard noticed him and came his way, showing her hands and bobbing her antennae in a friendly fashion. T’aki bobbed back politely enough, but clutched Sanford’s neck tighter, whispering, “Where are we?”

“I need to talk to someone,” Sanford said, setting his clingy son down. He rubbed the boy’s shoulder-joints as he studied the strange men and women who surrounded the Blue House. Some were armed; all seemed, in some indefinable way, unsavory. “Just for a little while.”

“Big people talk?”

The words, her words, gave him a sting. “Yes. I won’t be long.”

“Look at all the children.” T’aki crouched close at his side, but craned his short neck forward, hands wringing in excitement. “Look at them all!”

“It’s two chits to watch the boy,” said the woman on reaching them. “We have clean water, no charge.”

Sanford clicked agreement, then knelt down and took T’aki’s hand. He rubbed the soft receptor pads while waiting for her to leave again, and when they were alone, softly said, “Piss.”

“What?”

“Piss. Right now. Don’t undress. Just do it.”

Hunching, palps stuttering with embarrassment, T’aki obeyed. A tiny damp patch appeared on the groin of his breeches and he looked at it in wide-eyed dismay. Sanford reached down and gave it a good rub, opening his hand fully to get the piss all the way on his own receptor pads. He wanted the scent mark, just in case.

“I’m going inside,” he said. “You play with the other children—”

“I peed on myself,” said T’aki woefully.

Sanford picked up a handful of dirt and rubbed it over his son’s groin until the area was just dirty and no trace of wet remained. “Play with the children and do not leave the yard with anyone. Not with anyone. Even if they tell you they are taking you to see me, do you understand?”

Oh, why was he doing this?

But T’aki nodded, that queer human affectation. Sanford patted him.

“If you get in trouble, scream as loud as you can. I’ll be just inside. There won’t be trouble,” he added.

“It must be a big talk.”

“Yes.” His gaze wandered; his claspers sniffed the air. “Go on now.”

T’aki went, looking back over his shoulder until he passed through the fence. He was swallowed by children and, in seconds, romping and squealing with the rest of them entirely free of care.

Sanford paid the two chits and went inside.

The first room was no larger than his home, crowded by men packed onto Heap-scavenged furniture. They lounged without speaking or looking at one another, drinking beer sold for ten chits a bottle or eating canned food sold for three. Notices on the wall discouraged the spitting of chaw, and advertised the availability of ferment and fresh meat upon request. The only light came from strings of lights tacked to the ceiling like stars. They had a radio somewhere, emitting human songs softly, almost subliminally. Again, he thought of Sarah and shook it off hard. This was not the place to think of her.

Presently, a female came to the front room to replenish the food and drink and exchange a few words with the small child taking chits. She saw him standing there and waved.

He clicked a greeting back at her. It felt foolish to wave in return.

She came over. “Twenty chits,” she said.

He paid, but it surprised him. Two to watch the boy was one thing—they provided toys and clean water—but twenty for this? He found himself wondering how much she earned in a night, then thought of Sam and the things he claimed he’d done for extra food, and then, disturbingly, of Sam’s hand squeezing Sarah’s chest.

“Are you ready?” she asked, tucking the chits away in her vest.

“Yes.” The smell was overwhelming. He’d been ready before he’d even reached the door.

She chirped at him cheerfully and moved the curtain, leading him into the rest of the building. The hall was narrow; the rooms which lined it, small and sealed away behind curtains. He didn’t mean to look, didn’t want to, but there was a television in one of them and his eyes went that way before he could stop himself. Through the torn curtain, he could see the image of humans mating on the monitor, shoving at one another with hard grunts and muted cries. The figures watching this joined in silence, motionless but for the male’s rubbing of his partner’s shoulders, their pheromones as thick as smoke.

“You like the videos?” the woman whispered, and he came away from the curtain fast. Her eyes were narrow, knowing, playful. “Sometimes it’s fun to watch them. Only one chit extra for a room with videos.”

And it was Sarah he thought of again, Sarah. He recoiled, palps snapping, and the woman rolled her shoulders in a human shrug and kept walking. She brought him to an empty room and drew the curtain. As he stood awkwardly looking for a bed, she undressed perfunctorily and hunkered down on the floor, her vens open.

She hadn’t even asked him to piss. It unnerved him. Perhaps sensing it, she chuckled and said, “You can if you want to, mister, but I can see you’re old enough.”

And so was she, if only just. Her vens winked at him, dark and wet. Sanford slowly unwrapped his breeches, but not all the way. He felt strangely reticent about being naked here. This wasn’t going the way he’d hoped.

What had he been hoping for?

He extruded his spermatogus and mounted, settling gingerly until she had all his weight. She was well-braced, as solid in her practiced position as a statue. He heard paper rustle and looked down around her head. She was reading a magazine.

He wanted to leave…but his belly was heavy almost to the point of pain, and he was here, wasn’t he? He’d already paid.

‘Just push her down,’ he thought in a nastily unexpected imitation of Sam. ‘Push her down and get inside. You know it’s what you want.’

He wanted to leave.

Sanford shifted and entered. She was fully open; he penetrated completely and expelled right away, wanting nothing but to get this over with. The endorphins took him. He floated, tension easing, for a count of ten. She waited until he was all the way back before releasing her own catalyst. Their fluids combined, igniting him to fresh chemical heights for another ten-count, one better and brighter than before.

“If you want to go again,” she said as he came back, “it’s only five chits, but you have to wait outside until you’re ready so I can work.”

Pleasure curdled into chaw.

“No, thank you.” Sanford disengaged and quickly wrapped his loins.

“Egg?” she asked, stretching.

The thought of bringing a child out of this moment was obscene. “No.”

She squatted over a pail and expelled the glistening jelly of their merging. “Is that all then?” she asked.

He hated himself. “Yes.”

“Would you like to share breath? Three chits.” She spread her palps and leaned forward.

He looked at her hand, open and expectant before him. He wanted to be touched. The radio in the other room sang to him.

“All right, well…good night then. Ask for Zho’d’kan’ when you come again. You’re cute.” She waved to him again and pulled the curtain.

Sanford went out to collect his son. T’aki pestered him a little while about the big talk and then quieted. It was late. They went home.

CHAPTER TEN

Right up until the end, Sarah wasn’t sure it was going to come off at all. She’d done as much as she could do the night before: mixing up her dad’s top-secret barbeque sauce in one five-gallon bucket and some store-bought teriyaki marinade in another, loading plates and cups and condiments into the van, and emptying all her plastic tubs of her meager possessions so they could be transformed into coolers. She’d been up since seven this morning doing the rest. It took so much more time than she’d expected—slicing tomatoes and onions, de-leafing lettuce, packing up chips, cookies and buns—and she still had to go buy the meat because her refrigerator was too small to let her do that early.

She didn’t even try the village grocery store down the street, not because she didn’t think they’d have enough, but because she thought anyone on base buying a few hundred pounds of meat just might look suspicious enough to warrant alerting security. Now that it was the eleventh hour, she’d become positively paranoid about that.

At the ShopALot in Wheaton, Sarah stretched her IBI credit card to its last eleven cents, buying twenty boxes of the cheapest beef patties, two hundred fifty pounds of frozen chicken, every last package of beef or pork from the value section, and fifty pounds of assorted hearts, tongues, and tripe. It completely filled two carts.

She was feeling pretty proud of herself as she sat out in the parking lot, dumping bags of chicken into buckets of sauce, when she suddenly remembered they were going to need charcoal. And so, back into the store she ran with her own bank card to buy thirteen bags, which was all they had on the shelves. And back again for a lighter. And back again for ice for the drinks, which she realized only after she was loading it into the van was block and not crushed. She didn’t have time to take it back; it was already five o’clock and she’d told Sanford four or four-thirty.

She drove fast back to Cottonwood, the van so laden that she could feel it pulling thickly to the right every time she touched the brakes. She ran into trouble at the checkpoint, which she’d fully expected even before she saw it was the jerk guard, but she was ready for it, producing her printed authorization and a copy of the permit and plan, which was supposed to have been posted for ten days prior to the event.

“I never seen one of these,” the guard said, frowning at it and her suspiciously.

“What can I tell you?” Sarah lied smoothly. “I put ‘em up, they tear ‘em down. But it’s all completely legit. That’s my authorization and it’s approved. Now please let me in. My ice is melting.”

“I better check with the boss,” the guard said, reaching for his paz.

“Go ahead. I’ll be just inside. Just keep right and follow the smell of barbeque.” And she rolled her window up and drove through.

He didn’t stop her, but he was on that phone before the gate was shut behind her. There was going to be trouble later on, she knew it and she was ready for it, but what was important now was to get too far along for anyone to stop her.

Sanford had the tables set up all along the causeway, smack down the middle of the road. They didn’t look like much—pressed aluminum over sawhorses, old doors balanced on oil drums, mismatched lumber nailed haphazardly into shape—but they were stable and it looked like he’d brought enough.

He’d also brought friends. A double-row of aliens lined the causeway, standing shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the road, looking like nothing so much as crowd-control at a concert. Or a riot. The throng of aliens beyond them numbered in the hundreds, but they were a quiet throng, shifting restlessly as they watched her park the van, but making no move to advance on her. The security crew, if that was what they were, did not acknowledge her presence, but some of her clients came over to help unload. Sanford, of course, who opened every plastic tub of food and solemnly inspected the contents before carrying it to a table. Byrnes, who casually punched two bags of ice into pieces for the coolers and wrapped the rest in thick plastic sheets to keep them from melting so fast. And Samaritan, astonishingly, who took the charcoal and started up one hell of a fire under the hood of his car; he’d even built a grill for it out of what appeared to be a grille, appropriately enough. In twenty minutes, the tables were filled, the van was almost empty (just the soda that wouldn’t fit in the coolers) and the size of the watching crowd had grown. Some of them were carrying food chits; she could see Sanford and some of the others moving quietly among them, telling them to put their money away.

They had just put the first batch of patties on the grille when the armored vans pulled up.

“Here we go,” Sarah murmured, swiping sweat from her brow. She finished pouring the last two bags of chips into a plastic tub and went to face the music.

It was van Meyer’s personal shadow jumping down from the lead van, Piotr Lantz in the flak-vested flesh. She hadn’t been expecting that. Instantly, she adjusted her internal thermostat from indignant and defensive to innocent and subtle. “Hi!” she called, slapping on a grin. “Come to help set up?”

“Shut it down!” he bellowed. He marched towards her, guards at his back, red-faced and plainly furious. “All of it! Right now! You know the fucking rules!”

“I followed the rules,” she said mildly, trying to look confused.

“No gifts, you numb cunt!” he shouted, now inches from her face. “No gifts! None! You pack this shit up right now or I’ll personally kick your slats all the way back to Mayberry!”

She hadn’t had to feign her jump when he’d called her a cunt, but she wasn’t nearly as flustered as she pretended to be when she pulled out the same authorization papers and postings she’d shown at the Checkpoint.

“What the fuck is…” He snatched them up and held them side by side before him, his eyes darting from one to the other, less like a man reading than a man comparing mugshots. At last he lowered them and stared at her, his expression one part disbelief to two parts rage. He crumpled them deliberately in his fists and threw them at the ground.

Sarah bent down and retrieved them before they could blow away, expecting at any second to feel his elbow or the butt of his rifle or even his boot crash down on her spine. It didn’t happen. “It’s completely legal,” she said, straightening up. “Community events are allowed under the bylaws and it’s been posted for ten days—”

“You liar. Where did you post it?”

She gave him her widest eyes. “Here, of course.”

“What fucking good does that do? You were supposed to post it in Corporate Headquarters!”

“Was I?” Sarah went to the van for her case and put it on her hood to flip through it. “I’m pretty sure it said to post in the affected area, and since—”

Piotr grabbed the lid and slammed it shut with enough violence to have taken off a few fingers, if only her reflexes had been just a little slower. The case went flying into the road and she went banging down backwards on the blister-hot hood of her van with Piotr’s face right in front of her, his hand digging at the neck of her shirt. “You pack this shit up right now,” he spat. “I’m not telling you again.”

“No,” she said.

“This is an illegal gathering!”

“No, it isn’t. I’ve been approved.”

“You may have snuck this past a bank of fucking computers, but that doesn’t make you smart, little girl.” He snatched up the crumpled authorization slip and slapped it against her face, shoving it into her cracked cheekbone until tears of pain sparked in her eyes. “Even if this little party qualified as a community event, which it doesn’t, this permit you’re so proud of applies to your clients only! Only!” One final painful shove and he let go suddenly and backed up, waving the business-end of his rifle at the gathered aliens as he snapped, “Every bug you feed more than that is in violation of the Fair Nurture Act. That means I can arrest them and you, smart girl! Now you got one more chance to pack it the fuck up or I take you in!”

“And their families,” said Sarah, pulling her shirt down.

His beady eyes narrowed. “What.”

She found the papers on the ground, smoothed them out, and turned them around to show him. “It allows for community events to be held on behalf of my clients and their families. Excuse me.”

Piotr backed up slowly as she walked on straight, if watery, legs over to the nearest alien she recognized, and put her hand on him. “This is Abraham Levin,” she said. “My client.”

“Funny, he don’t look Jewish,” one of the soldiers said, and Piotr silenced their laughter with a savage look.

“And this is his brother, Ephraim,” Sarah lied, taking a total stranger’s arm. “This is his cousin, Dom. This is his uncle, Larry.”

“Family means maggots only, you fucking moron!” Piotr roared.

“It doesn’t say that.” Standing her ground between him and her party, Sarah held out her tattered authorization. “It doesn’t say that anywhere, Mr. Lantz. If you want, I’ll get you my employee manual and you can look it up. Family is never defined, not in the Fair Nurture Act, not in Cottonwood’s Residential Code, not in any bylaw of the International Bureau of Immigration. Neither is community event. Now I—”

A quiet scraping sound distracted her: Samaritan, calmly turning the burgers before they burned. When she looked back, Piotr and his goons were staring too, and not just at Samaritan, but at all of them. In their faces, she saw the first realization that they were four men staring down a street full of hungry aliens. She could feel herself wanting to smile and made herself stay cool. She wasn’t out of this yet, not until they were back in their toy trucks and away.

“Now I followed every rule,” she continued. “And unless you can come up with a legal reason why I shouldn’t be here, I’d like you to leave. This event is for my clients and their families, and you, sir, are neither.”

Now he looked at her. It was not the look of a defeated man. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” he snarled. “But you’re going to find out that I am just as smart as you are.”

“I wouldn’t be too proud of that,” she said evenly. “Apparently, I’m a fucking moron.”

Some of the aliens behind her made that grinding-scuttling laughter. Piotr looked furiously in that direction, then marched up to the nearest table and swung at the first thing he must have seen. Perhaps he thought it was a box of chips, or even a stack of paper dishes, bundled up in plastic to keep from blowing away. If he’d just dumped the table over, he might have started a movement with his soldiers, but no, he had to march over and dramatically backhand it.

The sound of his hand cracking into six solid blocks of ice was not loud, not loud at all, but plenty dramatic.

“Oh wow!” gasped Sarah, completely forgetting that she was on the opposite side of the moral fence from this barking little junkyard dog. More of the aliens laughed, but she ran over to catch unthinking at Piotr’s sleeve. “Did you break it? Let me s—”

He slammed his elbow into her throat and shoved her off onto the ground. “Back in the van!” he bellowed, stalking away. “And I warn you, little girl, you put one foot out of line and I will personally cut it off and fuck you up the ass with the stump! You have no fucking idea who you’re dealing with!” He looked at his hand, flexed it, and swung swearing up into the van’s cab.

In another minute, even the dust from their tires was gone.

Sarah slowly pushed herself up into a sitting position, still rubbing at her neck, but smiling. “Well,” she croaked. “That was easier than I thought it would be.”

“Day ain’t over yet,” Samaritan remarked, plating the first burgers. “Everyone line up. Keep it quiet, don’t get greedy, eat fast and get out of here.”

“And try to relax,” Sarah said, climbing to her feet and gathering up what she could of her windblown case and papers. “This is supposed to be a party.”

* * *

Shortly after dark, they turned the spy-light on them. Apart from some muttering and shaded eyes, the feast roared on in good spirits. There was little in the way of supervision, but so far, everyone was behaving. Even Sam restrained himself to only the occasional cuff and shout. Nobody had gotten hurt and everyone had been fed.

Sanford checked two empty containers on a table and set them aside to make more room for chicken and drinks. The bread was long gone and the vegetation likewise. Someone had emptied the last bags of what Sarah called ‘chips’ into a single plastic tub and now even that was down to a thin layer of crumbles. The last of the ice had been broken—some of the younger ones had made a game of it, bashing away in teams to be the first to fully crush their block, with much cheering and wagering around them—but the drink cases were just as full as ever. Word of the feast had spread. People were bringing beer to chill, meat to cook. The crowd had doubled in size, even though those fed lingered only a little while before fading back to let others in. Many were parentless children; they’d scavenged under the tables for bones, soaking up brown sauce from the empty bucket with paper and eating it until someone coaxed them over to the plates of real food. Now they were fed and running with T’aki up and down the causeway, playing Catch-Banner and squealing laughter. Only one person kept apart and ate nothing.

She sat in the shadowy interior of her vehicle, with the long door open and her back braced against it, watching. If she tapped eyes with someone she knew, she bobbed her head and smiled, but otherwise did not move. As the hours had stretched out, she had become, to his eye, more pale, less animated. Tired, perhaps.

He had taken only three steps towards her before Sarah saw him, smiled, and tried to wave him back. He continued another two steps and was passed by his son in full flight, who leapt up into the vehicle and settled boldly on her lap. She laughed, rolled her eyes, and put her arm around his son.

“Do you want to come play?” T’aki was asking when Sanford reached them. “There’s lots of us.”

“No, that’s okay. I’m happy right here.”

“You don’t look happy,” T’aki said, and flinched when Sanford gave him a tap to the ear.

“Come and eat,” Sanford said, setting his insensitive son back on the ground.

“I couldn’t. There’s not enough.”

“You can have the chicken in red sauce,” T’aki chirped. “No one likes it!”

Sanford gave him another tap and a hard click to send him away. When he looked back, Sarah was staring into the interior of her own vehicle, her shoulders slumped. ‘Tactless boy,’ he thought, and came to stand just a little closer.

Neither of them spoke for a while. The feast continued, making up the words they didn’t have. The spy-light swept steadily back and forth across the crowds.

“This was a pretty stupid idea, wasn’t it?” she said at last.

Startled, he looked at her and saw only a tired discouragement. “No,” he said, amazed that she would think so.

But she nodded, not meeting his eyes. “They are never going to let me do this again. This was it, my one chance. I didn’t know you all hated sweet stuff. I wasted fifty pounds of chicken in barbeque sauce.”

“Someone will eat it.”

“Well, of course someone will eat it. I saw someone trying to eat roadkill out of the treads of a tire once. You’re starving, but I still got the wrong food.” Now she looked at him, and then beyond him, to the crowds. “And it’s running out. Honestly, I thought it was going to run out two hours ago, but they still keep coming. If only I’d known about the sweet stuff, I could have done more.” She sighed. “I should have done more.”

“You are one person,” he pointed out. “And you have done the best you could.”

She pulled a face—such an exceptionally pliant face—and looked away again. “I don’t actually enjoy sitting around and feeling sorry for myself, but what am I supposed to do? I’ve been watching people sneak in here for hours. No matter how many people come and have a good time, more of them keep coming. And then it hits me that there are twenty-five thousand people in here and what am I doing throwing a party for some of them while all the rest starve?”

“You are doing,” he said, sternly now, “the best you can. And biting at your hands for what they can’t carry achieves nothing.”

T’aki returned, carrying a plate of chicken in red sauce and a great heap of cookies with three cans of the cloyingly sweet drink. He put them in the van and crawled up to sit beside Sarah, antennae low and concerned.

“The thing is…” She picked up a cookie, tapped it on edge, and set it down again. “I’ve been sitting here all night trying to think of what comes next. What else is there to do? And there isn’t anything. This really was it. I got on my white horse and rode into battle for…for chocolate chip cookies and barbeque sauce, to feed a fraction of the population so small I can’t even calculate what it is, and for only one night anyway. I mean, what the hell, Sanford!” She threw herself back against the door and rubbed at her eyes, a picture of human defeat. “What was the point of it all?”

A short fight broke out at one of the further tables, where yang’ti gathered around a now-empty ice-case, squabbling over the clear, cold water. They spat and cuffed at each other until Sam stalked in between them and settled the matter by dumping the case on the ground. The spy-light came by, lingered on the dispersing group of angry yang’ti, and moved on.

“Well?” Sanford prompted.

She looked at him. “Well what?”

“What was the point? Why did you do this?”

She stared at him in obvious confusion. “I wanted to help.”

“Shouldn’t that count for something?”

“What, just wanting to?” She shook her head, leaning away from him. “I know people say that it’s the thought that counts, but here in the real world, good intentions are about as useful as fairy wands and wishes. Nothing matters but what a person does.”

“I don’t agree,” he said simply.

“Well.” She stared at him and finally laughed. “Well, too bad, I guess. Because other than that, I thought we got on pretty well.”

Yes, they did. And it really was funny, all things considered. He found himself staring at her arm around T’aki’s shoulder. And he found himself thinking of that night at the Blue House, and all his badly-grasped reasons for going, the clinging sense of guilt and shame that had followed him away.

He liked her. He wanted to touch her. He wanted, Ko’vi help him, to be touched by her. Her human fingers in his joint-seams—his blood crawled at the thought, but his heart throbbed.

A loud crash behind him broke him from these increasingly upsetting thoughts. He swung and saw more fighting at the farthest table, where several yang’ti were trying to steal the same plastic tub.

“Oh jeez, look at that.” Sarah got out of the van with T’aki in her arms to stand at his side (his claspers darted out to taste at her air before he could stop himself; he compressed them tight, mortified). “They can have those, I guess. Can you tell them—”

An air-splitting screech cut off the rest of her words, cut off damn near everyone’s. Sanford grabbed instinctively for his son and grabbed Sarah for good measure as yang’ti raiders armed with spears and clubs came streaking over the houses and down into the road. There were fifty of them at the very least, a larger party than he’d ever seen or even heard of, and surely they had thought it would be enough right up until they drew close enough to see that the feasters outnumbered them more than five to one. Raiders were, by and large, a cowardly bunch, but now the food was running out and it was now or never. They attacked, bashing through the sentries and falling on the crowd, weapons swinging indiscriminately at adult and child alike, fighting their way desperately to the tables for one handful of meat, one bottle of clean water.

Pandemonium.

Half the well-behaved and well-fed celebrants at the feast ran at once for their own homes. The other half either threw themselves screaming at the raiders or began snatching up anything they could carry to steal for themselves. In less time than it takes to click twice, hundreds of yang’ti were crushed together in riotous violence.

The spy-light swooped down and fixed. The klaxons on the wall began to howl. Sarah beside him jumped and looked wildly around, but he didn’t need her to tell him they were coming. The cry was already going up along the gate; IBI had been waiting all night for the right reason to come back.

“You better go,” she said, looking frightened. “Not home. Someplace safe—”

He heard the whistle just a split-second before the explosion. Concussion shell. It struck the road less than two meters from him and blasted everyone and everything around it with soundwaves. Sanford was knocked down, and Sarah was raised entirely off her feet and thrown backwards into her own van. T’aki started squalling, both hands flat over his bruised ear; it was all Sanford could do to hold on to him as yang’ti scattered around them. He was kicked, stomped, trampled.

Then the IBI van came racing up the road, smashing through tables and firing concussion bombs out both sides into the crowd. He could hear the humans laughing inside, calling out points as if it were a game, before they were swallowed by the sound of their own carnage.

Sanford got up, but stood frozen, his son clutched to his chest. More and more yang’ti were swarming, now fighting over broken tables for scraps of lumber. Someone came at him screeching, perhaps thinking he held a bit of plastic sheeting in his arms, and Sanford kicked him back hard enough to feel chitin crack. Home. IBI was between him and home, but they were turning around even now and when they came back—

A hand seized his arm and shook him. Sarah’s face swam before him, her eyes wild. “Get in the van!” she shouted, pulling at him.

He obeyed, and she swung in after him and banged the sliding door shut. It dulled the sound, but the screams went on. A second IBI van rolled onto the causeway and opened fire. Yang’ti raiders leapt on the vehicles, kicking at windows and ripping at panels until they were blasted flat. The real guns would come out soon.

“Get down!” she shouted as more concussion bombs burst in the street. “Oh God, they’re everywhere!”

She scrambled for the driver’s seat and ignited the engines. He was thrown back into the chair by the velocity of her escape, and then onto the floor. Drink cans and bags of trash slid around him. Something exploded off the van’s right, peppering the windows with rocks and fire. T’aki screamed. The thought that, once they were out, they might never be able to get back in tried to assert itself—his house would be ransacked, the secret room uncovered, the code-bank stolen—but just then the sky itself seemed to split open and burn. Sanford curled up as tight as he could around his son and let Sarah take him away.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

She took them home. She didn’t think about it, but just drove, threading the van through the chaos and the explosions with a deftness she never would have believed existed in either her ancient Ford or her own reflexes. The checkpoint gate stood open, armed guards on either side, but they waved her through without letting her stop, shouting at her to just get out, go, get out of the way.

So she took them home, her heart pounding and eyes staring, to her sensible little pre-fab in her pleasant little neighborhood. She drove right up into her garage and did not feel safe until the door had dropped behind her and everything was calm and black.

Smell of smoke. Screaming, the way she’d always known there must be. Smoke and fire and screaming.

“Is this where you live?” T’aki asked hesitantly.

Sarah roused, realized she’d been sitting and staring at the dashboard for at least three minutes, her hands still white on the wheel, in her dark and empty garage. She made herself let go, rubbed her aching knuckles, and tried to smile for him, even if she couldn’t quite yet look at him. “This is it, jellybean. Kinda empty, I know, but I like it.”

“You should put papers up,” T’aki suggested, and his father hushed him. “Or get a chair. What?”

Sarah blinked and looked stupidly out the van’s window at the garage itself. She laughed. “No. Gosh, no. Sorry, honey, I’m…I’m really rattled right now.”

T’aki made a soft rattling sound of his own, plucking at the seatbelt beside him. Sanford hushed his son with a touch and said nothing, but his eyes in the rearview mirror were strange and after a moment, it occurred to her why.

She’d brought them out of Cottonwood.

They stared at each other through the mirror while T’aki tried to entertain himself with the upholstery and since the world refused to stop spinning, at last Sarah got out and went around to open the side door. Neither of them moved until she’d done so, and it was obviously not an easy feat for Sanford to get out—his back didn’t bend, and even with his long legs clumsily scrunched up, his head scraped the ceiling as he shuffled toward her, feet still tangled up in trash bags. She put out her hand instinctively to help; they both paused to stare at it, perhaps even both wondering what she possibly thought she could do about it, pick him up? Then, to her mild surprise, he took it.

His fingers were broad, long, flat, tapered to points, and covered all down its length with thin bands of hard shell on top and fine, spiky filaments on the bottom. The effect was like holding several fat centipedes at once, but oddly, not unpleasant. Perhaps because she knew it was his hand, just a hand. She closed her fingers gingerly around him, smiling, wondering if she should pull or what. He just crouched there, half in and out of the van, looking at her.

His longest finger moved in her grip. The point curled in, pressed on her palm. He clicked softly, watching her. His eyes, those weirdly human eyes, seemed cautious.

O…kay. Sarah moved her own thumb along the plates of his wrist and found a kind of ridge. Under the overlapping chitin was a soft, leathery patch of skin. His sensory pad, she thought, remembering orientation. Where he could feel her touching him. She smiled, raising her eyes to his, and pressed on it the way he pressed on her. ‘Shaking hands with an alien,’ she thought.

His other arm, long and thorned, reached out to grip the door’s frame. He stepped down, his hand still easy in hers, and twisted his rigid torso nimbly out until he could straighten up. He didn’t say a word, just clicked now and then, very quietly. His breath was heavy and slightly wet to hear, the breath of a winded asthmatic, but he looked calm enough.

Gosh, this was a long stare. Was she supposed to say something, do something? She thought back to her training manuals, but could not remember a single line of advice that began, ‘When shaking hands…’

“I’m sorry things went so wrong,” she said. “It was pretty silly of me to think it wouldn’t.”

“Yes,” he replied, so matter-of-factly that she felt her cheeks glowing a little. “But it was a good thing while it lasted. Even the smallest good things matter, Sarah.”

And he gazed at her, his finger pressing on her palm.

“Can I sleep in the blue van?” T’aki asked finally, sprawled spread-eagle on the concrete. “I don’t like this floor.”

Sanford took his hand back. “This is not our home,” he said. “Do as you are told.”

“Honey, you can do better than the van, I promise. Come on. Let’s go inside.”

“We are inside.”

“Well, then let’s go inside again.” She bent down to take his tiny hand, and once he’d hopped up, opened the door into the kitchen.

T’aki’s long, low rattling whistle as he stepped wonderingly onto the cheap linoleum made her see it all as he did: the huge open rooms, empty floors and clean walls, the shiny rust-free surfaces, undamaged appliances whose very basic function he might not be able to guess, and lighting everywhere. She looked at him and felt suddenly and bitterly ashamed.

“Is this whole place just for you?” T’aki asked, opening a cupboard as if to check for roommates.

“Not exactly. Fagin! Now don’t be scared, jellybean,” she said as Fagin’s distinctive howling yawn and lazy pawsteps heralded his arrival from her bedroom. She stood back and watched closely as canine met alien in her kitchen, very aware of Sanford leaning tensely forward, ready either to snatch or kick at a moment’s need. ‘But he trusts me,’ she thought as her dog’s muzzle passed sniffing over his son’s small, vulnerable head. ‘If he didn’t, there is no way he’d be letting this happen.’

Impulsively, she reached and slipped a finger between his wrist and arm plates, just a little stroke, to ease his mind.

His breath hitched. He looked at her, even tenser.

Having determined that the child was neither a hamburger nor a vacuum cleaner, Fagin gave Sarah his best labradoodle, ‘What the hell, woman?’ stare and then went over to his food dish, grumbling to find it empty.

“What kind of animal is it?” T’aki asked curiously, taking a few steps after the scruffy tail.

“It’s a dog.”

“I thought dogs looked different.” He stretched a finger out, drew it back fast when Fagin glanced at him, and bounced in place, wringing his hands. After a few false starts, he crept around to the other side of the floor-sniffing dog to finally venture a pat. Fagin did not react; T’aki made that rattling whistling sound again.

“There’s a lot of different kinds of dogs. His name is Fagin.”

“Hello, Fagin,” T’aki said, patting with great confidence. After a short pause, he looked up at Sarah. “Does he talk yet?”

“Dogs can’t talk, honey.”

T’aki looked surprised. “But I’ve seen them!”

“Do you remember what I told you about human programs for pretend?” Sanford asked.

“Oh.” T’aki patted the dog some more. She couldn’t tell if he were disappointed or merely curious, but at least he wasn’t scared. “Are you going to eat him later?”

Sanford glanced at her.

She guessed it was a fair question, all things considered. “People don’t…well, some people eat dogs, but not me. Fagin is my…” Ugh, did she want to explain about keeping animals in captivity for the amusement of humans? “Friend.”

“But he doesn’t talk.”

“No.”

“Well, he can’t be much of a friend,” T’aki remarked, still patting. Fagin finally gave up on phantom kibble and turned around to slather the boy in tongue. Sanford twitched hard, but T’aki only laughed and clapped his hands to his face. “I like his breath!”

“There’s a first time for everything,” Sarah said, and all at once, as if the resolution of this last uncertain meeting were all that had been sustaining her, felt like dropping down on her knees and just bawling. She looked away, blinking fast to keep the tears back, and when she was sure she could keep her voice steady for a few moments more, pasted on a big smile and said, “I bet if you go out to the yard there, Fagin will be happy to bring you his ball for a few hours of Fetch.”

“What’s Fetch?” T’aki asked, leaning forward to offer his face for more swabbing.

“It’s a game. He’ll teach you.” Sarah opened the glass door a little wider, still smiling. Her face felt hot and brittle. She could smell the smoke from here. “It’s dark and the fence is pretty high. I don’t think anyone can see you.”

“Stay close,” Sanford said. “And play quietly. No squealing.”

“Yes, Father. Come on, dog!”

Out they ran together, where the first thing Fagin did, Sarah saw to her weary mortification, was teach the boy to pee on the fence post.

“I need a shower,” she said. “Can you…I mean…do you need anything or…?”

“Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m just…” She didn’t know how to end that without sounding unbelievably elitist, which she supposed she was, relatively. “I need a shower,” she said finally.

He made a curiously evocative gesture with one hand and crouched down in the kitchen to watch his son and her dog in the yard. “I’ll be here.”

Which made very little sense to her, but freed her to hurry to the bathroom, strip off her smoky clothes, and turn out a hot and tear-disguising spray of water.

Stupid, she was so stupid! What a great idea, to throw a party in their faces, just like it couldn’t possibly come back to hurt anyone! Because of her stupidity, people had been hurt, had maybe been arrested, could even have been killed! She’d thought, she’d really thought, that just because it wasn’t illegal, IBI couldn’t hurt her. She really was a fucking moron. Why would they need to hurt her, when they had a whole camp full of people they could shoot at will? They had driven armored cars down the middle of a crowded street, throwing bombs at unarmed people, at children. They didn’t need to hurt her, they just wanted her to see who they could hurt. They wanted to slap her mischievous little hands for her, and if they weren’t stinging enough already, they would be happy to slap her again.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah whispered, pressing her face to the tiles. “I am going to make a full and immediate apology. I’m going to agree with everything they say when they say the aliens started it. I’m going to take responsibility. I’m going to offer up my hands.”

The shower drummed, non-committal.

Sarah bathed her face, washing slowly and with head bent, for penance. She scrubbed the smoke from her hair and down the drain. She pulled on her threadbare robe and tied it shut and stared at herself in the steamy mirror. She wanted to see a child there, a scared and stupid child who was ready to cry her apologies, but she didn’t and she really didn’t know why not.

Because even the smallest good things matter.

“Oh bull,” she whispered. She touched the fading bruise under her eye, felt the dull throb of the cracked bone beneath, and then looked at her hand, the palm of her hand, where Sanford’s finger had lingered so long.

“It was worth it,” she said to herself.

That was the dead-wrong attitude to have.

“It was still worth it.”

Maybe, but she’d better not sound that way when she called IBI or the riots were never going to be allowed to stop. Nobody cared what the aliens did to themselves inside the containment walls. This was all about making sure Sarah Fowler learned her lesson. Had she?

“I can say I did.”

Kate had always told her she was a good liar. She hoped she could be as persuasive even when no one could see her huge, honest eyes.

Sanford was just as she’d left him when she returned to the living room in her warm cotton robe. His antennae twitched in her direction, but he didn’t speak, not even when she dialed the office, gave her name, and asked to be patched through to the Alien Incident division. It seemed a very long wait on hold, devoid of music, and when it was over, she was unpleasantly surprised to hear Mr. van Meyer on the other end of the line.

“I am so glad to hear you made it away,” he said by way of greeting, his voice coffee-dark with concern. “We thought you might have been trapped inside.”

“No, sir. Your security response team was very thorough.”

“I shall pass along your praise. Piotr will be pleased.”

“Mr. van Meyer—” Here are my hands. “—this is all my fault. It was my idea and I…I just thought I could throw it all together and I didn’t know what I was doing and I was way in over my head before I knew it. I’m so sorry.”

Sanford’s head turned slightly. That was all.

“Ja?” Calm. Mildly concerned. Waiting.

“I was only trying to help. The community center here in the neighborhood has all these events on the calendar and…I thought it was such a good idea. I’ve been having so much trouble getting all my census reports and I thought…I just thought a little party with my clients and their families could show them I was working for them. I just wanted to meet them and be…”

Sanford could hear her. He was right there, listening.

“…and be their friend instead of the enemy,” she said, her gut twisting. She wished he’d look at her, even glare at her. He just crouched there, silent, watching T’aki and Fagin running back and forth in the yard. She turned away, facing herself into the corner and shutting her eyes. “It all got out of hand so fast. It’s my fault, Mr. van Meyer. I take full responsibility.”

“Nee, nee, Miss Fowler, please to relax. You take too seriously these little unfortunates. These things happen.”

“Mr. van Meyer, there was a riot—”

“And is soon to be contained, dear girl. By morning, all forgotten. These things happen and is nobody’s fault. Piotr inform me of the incident and all your paperwork clearly state your intention. Your very good intention, ja?” A pause, like the stroking of his hand across her brow. She shivered. He said, softly, “But perhaps now you begin to understand, we are not friends with the bug.”

“Yes, sir.”

“IBI exist for two purpose, Miss Fowler, and that is to tend the bug and to police the bug. When zookeeper tend to bear, he may feel affection, but is never to be forgotten the danger. Zookeeper is not friend of bear.”

“Yes, sir.” She wondered if Sanford could hear van Meyer saying these things. She wondered if he could hear what she was agreeing to. His face gave her no clue as to his thoughts or feelings, but he watched her.

“You have innocent idea to recreate among them, but you do not understand the mind of the bug. You are too young, perhaps, to remember that in beginning, we give bug more freedom, we offer visa to leave camps and begin integration in human communities. This we do, as you do, with very good intention, ja? But bug recreate violently. There are skirmishes in street with humans, there are cars overturned, there are killings. The bug is not a gentle traveler of peace and illumination, Miss Fowler. The bug is bottom-feeding slum-roach who recreate with riot. It is not his fault. It is our responsibility to provide security, nee? Structure. Routine.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Ja, and you will remember this. I was very young once, Miss Fowler. I tried to be as you are, a friend to the bug, but bug do not need friends. They need control. Tonight, a sad thing. You have tried to do good work and it lead to a terrible fire. We should be grateful no one was caught in this one.”

The words were a slap. She wondered if it was a deliberate reference to her parents, wondered how in hell he knew about that. Whether it was or not, it hurt.

“For tonight, a good sleep. Tomorrow, you come after work to the office for incident report with Piotr.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This mistake you make, you make with best of intentions. Now it is done. I accept your apology and hope you do not let this terrible thing take you away from us. I should hate to lose you. You do very good work.”

“Not yet,” said Sarah, wiping her eyes. “But I’m trying, Mr. van Meyer. I really am.”

Which were probably the only honest words in the whole conversation. She hung up, stood in her robe next to the phone until she realized she was trembling slightly, and finally turned to trudge back and get dressed.

Sanford had stood up and come silent as a cat into the living room. He watched her from the other side of the sofa. She couldn’t meet his eyes.

“Well?” she said dully. “Did I sound convincing?”

He walked around the sofa slowly, his eyes on her like she was a deer he was trying not to spook. When he reached her, he did the weirdest thing yet: he cupped her elbows in his hands, fanned his mouth-palps slightly and exhaled on her face. Softly. Deliberately. And looked at her.

Sarah blinked once, twice, and then burst out in an uncontrollable fit of laughter. ‘Oh jeez, kiddo, bipolar much?’ she thought, listening to herself in dismay, but wow, he breathed on her. What was she supposed to do with that?

Sanford, thrown by what was obviously an unexpected reaction, backed up behind the sofa again and stood there, loudly clicking and buzzing to himself and looking thoroughly embarrassed. She wanted to apologize—God knew he was owed one at least as good as the one she’d given van Meyer—but all she could think of was to exclaim T’aki-style, ‘I like your breath!’ and that just sent her off in renewed giggles.

Stammering something she hoped would at least sound contrite, Sarah clutched the neck of her robe and ran to her room, where she threw herself on the bed and smothered her face in a pillow until the hysteria had passed.

‘Dude breathed on me,’ she thought, wheezing her way to self-control. ‘First we fingered up each other’s hands and then he breathed on me. Oh, light the candles and break out the violins!’

That got her going again. She laughed into the muffle of cotton batting until her stomach cramped and her face felt sweaty, and she had to either stop and roll over or die.

She stared at the ceiling, breathing hard, arms and legs spread across her blankets, limp. She had an alien in the living room. She had another one running around in the backyard, playing with the dog and peeing on the fence posts. She could not stay here all night.

Sarah sighed and got up. She tugged on a pair of shorts and a baggy old tee, whispering vehement admonitions under her breath to discourage further crazy behavior. Her hair was still wet; she finger-combed it over her scar, patted it down and sat on the bed until she was sure she could behave herself. Then she got up and went out to see how else she could screw up before this night was over.

* * *

The dog tired out before his son. He knew he should not take pleasure in that, but by the amazed tone of Sarah’s voice when the animal came panting inside, he had to. His son, born in Cottonwood and fed by the labors of the Heaps, and yet able to overexert a healthy dog.

But T’aki’s own surrender was not long in coming, and soon after the animal had collapsed on the carpet to sleep, the boy came to where Sanford had found a way to crouch more or less comfortably over one arm of the sofa and watch television, and climbed up onto his lap. “I like this place better than our house,” he said. “Can we stay?”

“No,” Sanford said. “We are fortunate to be guests here tonight. Tomorrow, Sarah will take us home.”

She looked at him and in that look, he could see her trying to find a plan that would lead him and his son safely out behind IBI’s grasp forever, but she really was no good at planning. In the end, she said nothing, only paced away to another window and peered out into the empty streets. Waiting for IBI to come. He had already told her that if they meant to come, they would have done so by now and unless she gave them a reason to chase after her—if, for instance, she got into her van and tried to leave—they would likely leave her be, but she kept going back to the windows.

“Come and sit with us,” he said now, knowing that if she’d just be still, she would realize how exhausted she was.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?” T’aki asked.

She looked at him and then at Sanford, calmly stroking his son’s seams. She came to the sofa and sat beside him. T’aki stuck out his foot boldly; she took it in her hand without looking away from the monitor and held it. “You get enough to eat tonight, jellybean?” she asked.

“Yes.” And at a warning glance from Sanford, added, “Thank you.”

“Oh jeez, don’t thank me for that nightmare.” She glanced away, jiggling the boy’s leg carefully in her grip as she looked out the window and over the white containment walls, where smoke still rose in the distance. “I’m sorry it didn’t turn out better, that’s all.”

They watched the television. A commercial advertisement interrupted the program: A human male gave shimmering stones to a female, to her evident surprise and delight. They pressed their mouths together. Sharing breath, he supposed, and thought of Sarah.

“Where is your mate?” T’aki asked suddenly.

She seemed as surprised by the question as the television-female by her stones. “I don’t have one.”

“Did he die?” T’aki asked, and Sanford gave him a click and a sharp stare.

“No, I’ve never had one.”

“Never? Why not? Aren’t you grown?”

Oh, tactless boy.

“Sure, I’m grown,” Sarah said, smiling down at him. “I’m plenty grown.”

“Are you too old?” T’aki asked doubtfully and Sanford clicked again, louder.

“You’re never too old for love, jellybean,” she said, and hummed a little, looking at the television.

“Father says there’s enough females for every human to have a mate. Sometimes more than one. I’ve seen pictures.”

Sanford covered his eyes.

“I don’t know, T’aki. I never really thought about it. I guess I just figured I had plenty of time. And then life got in the way.” She trailed off, looking at the monitor without really watching it, and stroking at the joints of T’aki’s toes while he chirred. “I guess…somewhere along the way, I just got used to being the sort of person who doesn’t have a mate.”

“How do you get used to that?”

“You get a dog,” she answered with a crooked smile.

That was that for perhaps five minutes.

“Is Fagin your only friend?” T’aki asked.

Sanford clicked hard.

But she smiled. “There’s always you, jellybean.”

“Don’t you have a father?”

Her smile became pained. Sanford clicked again and added a brisk tap to the top of the boy’s head.

“Not anymore, baby.”

“What happened to him?”

“Go to sleep,” Sanford said brusquely.

“But I’m not tired!”

“It’s okay, Sanford.” It wasn’t, anyone could see that, but she sighed and got up to fetch something from the small shelf above an unused fireplace. A picture, pressed under glass. Four humans. She sat down again and passed it into T’aki’s hands. “That’s me, about ten years ago. And that’s my sister, Kate. And this is my father and my mother.”

“Mother,” T’aki murmured, running his fingers over the glass.

“About two years after that was taken, there was a bad thing.”

“Did the vans come?”

Her face seemed to crumple slightly. She looked away again and finally back, composed. “No, nothing like that. But while Kate and I were away from the house, there was a fire and…both my parents died.”

“Oh.” T’aki traced the uneven edge where the photograph had blackened and blistered, then gave it back.

“The house burned down and just about everything was gone except some old boxes of junk in the basement and that picture, which was right on the living room wall.” She stood and placed it back on the shelf, turning it minutely back and forth until she had achieved the perfect angle. It stood alone, the only item in all this room that seemed to be for decoration’s sake alone. “Your toys were in the basement,” she remarked. “I guess that’s really why I kept them all this time. It’s not like I play with them anymore.”

“Do you want them back?” T’aki asked. “I can give them…some of them back.”

“No. Toys don’t want to be keepsakes, honey, they want to be toys. And I want them to be useful.” She turned around and looked at them, at the boy curled small in Sanford’s arms. She raised her eyes in a knowing and oddly fatherly way, to meet his, smiling. “Think you could sleep if you had to, jellybean?”

“Well…” T’aki picked at a toe dolefully. “If I had to.”

“Come on. I have a spare bed in here.”

Sanford followed her down the short hall to a room easily twice the size of his home in Cottonwood. The bed would have occupied the entire space he used for working. Its sheets were white. He had not seen anything so white in years.

Sarah withdrew while Sanford helped his son arrange a nest, returning in a short while with a glass of clear water and cushions. The dog came with her, but did not leave again when she did, electing instead to climb the mattress and curl itself possessively at the bed’s center, side to side with T’aki. Seeing the animal’s open mouth and sharp teeth exposed in a yawn unsettled him badly, but T’aki was not afraid to share the nest and Sarah seemed not to think the creature dangerous.

Sarah had not thought IBI dangerous.

“I’m sorry I made Sarah sad,” T’aki said softly, under the sheet. “I didn’t know she was all alone.”

Sanford found a foot in the swaddles and stroked a pad.

“She looks scared in this house.”

“Perhaps,” said Sanford, thinking of the phone call, and what he had heard of the other voice, the dark voice.

“I would be scared to live here, too,” came the next confession. “It’s too big.”

“It only seems so because it is empty. My home on yang’Tak is even bigger than this one.”

The sheets pulled back to reveal his son’s fascinated face. “Bigger?”

“Much bigger, but—” He bent to share breath, which the dog reverently shared as well. “—even our home in Cottonwood is a home with a family inside it. I am you and you are me. Go to sleep.”

“Yes, Father.” The sheets went up.

Sanford returned to the sofa in the front room, and to the monitor where Earth’s stories were told. He’d seldom received as good an image on the monitors that fell into his hands in the Heaps, despite his best repairs, and he enjoyed watching it, if only for the one night.

“You don’t have to sleep out here,” Sarah said behind him. “You can have my bed, if you want. I don’t mind the couch.”

“I would be more comfortable with my son.”

“Oh. Okay. Well…you know where everything is. If Fagin annoys you, just shove him out into the yard, he’ll be fine. If you need me for anything, don’t be shy about waking me up. Just get some sleep and tomorrow…”

He waited.

“Tomorrow…” She turned away, took a few steps, turned back. She glanced once at the door to the room where T’aki slept and lowered her voice. “I was thinking maybe we should just—”

“You will take us back,” Sanford said.

“I…don’t think I can do that.”

“I don’t have the code-bank, Sarah. Even if you went in and fetched it out for me, it isn’t yet repaired. I need my tools to do that work. I need salvage. I am not ready. You saved us tonight, but one night is nothing.”

“What if…” She checked the empty hall again and said, even softer, “What if it’s gone? What if they—Piotr and the rest of them,” she added hurriedly, although he could all but see the yang’ti rioters shining in her eyes. “What if they blew your house up? What if they burned it all down?”

Just as if these thoughts had not already occurred to him, Sanford held up his hand to stop her flood of fears and said, “What is merely buried can be recovered. Tools can be replaced.”

“But we’re already out! What if…” She raised and dropped her empty hands helplessly. “What if I can never get you out again? If tonight has shown me anything, it’s that I really suck at planning! If I can’t throw a barbeque, I sure won’t be able to mastermind an escape. It’s mind-boggling that I got you out tonight, I could never do it again!”

“My escape only matters if it ends in the ship.”

She raised one hand and brushed at her eyes. “Will you think about it?” she asked softly. “Please?”

“Yes. Will you take us back if that is my decision?”

“Yeah. God, I…” But that was all she said. She stared at the empty wall beside her and finally turned around again.

“You think you won’t sleep tonight,” said Sanford, watching humans take enthusiastic bites out of the things Sarah called ‘burgers’. Now that he’d had one, their enjoyment seemed slightly less ridiculous. “But I hope you do. And I hope you understand that it has been a good day, in spite of everything.”

“I’m sorry, Sanford. I just don’t think I can see it that way.”

He watched her unhappy retreat until she put a door between them and then returned his attention to the television, switching through programs and waiting for sleep to settle on his own tight nerves. There were many different feeds, some of which addressed the problem of the bugs. Hatred and fear radiated from these humans, who kept them penned in as prisoners and who still accused them of spreading disease, of inciting riots, of engaging in criminal acts, of kidnapping and eating children. Even those few who spoke on their behalf seemed to be capable of only condescending kindness—the bugs should be cared for, because human intervention was necessary to keep the bugs from their own inherently dangerous lifestyle. Much in the manner of stray dogs or cats, they should not be summarily destroyed, but rather rescued, neutered, and placed in adoptive homes where they could be more effectively domesticated.

An idle thought: Sarah had never once used the word ‘bug’ in his presence. Like the names the humans had assigned him and T’aki, it stuck in her palps like a shard of bone and choked her.

Sanford gazed broodingly down the dark hallway, listening to the television rant. No one must ever tell. These were the agreements made when Commander Tlee’tathk stood before them in that last terrible hour, with the humans at the door and colonists weeping softly throughout the hold: Protect the women and never admit to their existence; offer up no aid if asked to open the ship and never allow a weapon to fall into their alien hands; above all things, never speak of the homeworld or its people. Let the humans draw what conclusions they wished to draw, take whatever they could take, but give them no more power.

Sanford moved through the channels, eyes fixed, listening only a few seconds to each program before moving on. He saw humans who were angry, who were laughing, who were sad. He saw tender parents with children, medics healing injured, the criminals engaged in murder and the soldiers who brought them down. He saw warmth and indifference and violence and hard work and games and pretend foolishness and deadly seriousness. He saw a world of people like any other people…and he was glad he saw it.

‘I gave her my breath,’ he thought suddenly, and clicked at himself in rueful amusement. Why had he done that? What had he expected, really? She didn’t know yang’ti ways.

He scrolled through the channels on the monitor. Talking. Fighting. Laughing. Eating. Mating. Shouting. Singing. Even the contorted half-jumps and bouncing they called ‘dancing’. Human life, naked before him. Honest, as Sarah was honest.

Idly now, lost in introspection, he dialed back several feeds to the program showing humans in copulation. Male and female, lying close together, mostly hidden in sheets, but plainly mating. He’d seen naked humans only in the pictures that came to the Heaps, and most of these were so unsavory that he could not stand to touch them even to recycle them, but he’d never given much thought to how they copulated. He hadn’t realized there would be so much movement. The touching, yes, but not the shoving, the biting and licking, the squeezing. They used their mouths, their hands, their chins and cheeks and thighs and maybe even more to touch each other everywhere. Because human skin could always feel everything, all the time.

Perhaps instead of breathing, he should have touched her. She might have understood that better.

Understood what, exactly?

He turned his palm over and stroked his fingertips along his own wrist-pad, back and forth, watching the monitor. It seemed a decidedly rigorous way to copulate, more like battle than mating. And it went on and on and on. He wondered if human bondmates copulated every day. And if so, if they had time to do anything else.

‘What is wrong with me?’ he asked himself suddenly, but it was a ridiculous thing to ask even in the quiet of his own mind. He’d touched Sarah’s hand, and yes, friends touched, they touched all the time and it was not strange to do so, but he’d shared his breath also, he’d wanted hers, and that act was intimate. There was nothing wrong with it. It may be unnatural to some degree (a fairly large degree), but it wasn’t wrong.

He liked her. He trusted her. And more than that lay some deeper emotion he could not put a name to. It was almost a craving. Not a sexual desire, there was nothing in her soft human body to arouse him, but sex was certainly a part of it, because…

Because…

Because he wanted to be with her.

Oh, that was an unpleasant revelation. When had that happened? And what was he supposed to do with it? He’d gone to the Blue House because of Sarah and there was no point trying to deny it. It had been her touches he’d been seeking in that miserable place, some part of him had known even then that he wanted to be with her. And Sam! Ko’vi help him, he’d hated to see Sam’s hand on her, hated it, not just because it humiliated her, but because…because…because Sam knew how to touch her and he didn’t.

He did not want to copulate in that fashion. It was on some level abhorrent to him, but he thought he could. He wanted to hear those sounds coming from her throat, see her hands reaching back to embrace him. He wanted to please her when they mated.

When.

Enough of this.

He switched off the television. He went outside—unlike his son, he did know what the toilet in the bathroom was for, but like so many things in this world, it was not made for him and he didn’t want to use it—and stared up at the sky for some time after he was done. He could not see yang’Tak’s star from this place, but the stars were still beautiful. It seemed to him that he didn’t always think so, but they were tonight.

Sanford went inside, shut and locked the glass door, and walked down the hall to Sarah’s room. She didn’t wake until he put his hand on her shoulder, and when she did, it was not with the frantic lunge of an anxious mind, but merely a hum and a sleepy query.

“We are yang’ti,” he told her. “Our people are called yang’ti.”

She looked at him in the dim light, her eyes catching the moon through the window. “Thank you,” she said, taking his hand.

He touched her palm, where her seams might be if she had them.

She touched his, her fingers small and smooth and hot on his receptor-pads.

They parted hands and he went away to sleep.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sanford woke to the smell of food. That alone was a phenomenon unvisited in many, many years, but it was doubly hard to ignore T’aki’s reaction. The boy came kicking and struggling out of the nest, immature claspers dashing at the air and a look of wild hope across his face, just as though he had not feasted to the very limits of his shell the previous night.

“It smells good. What is it?” T’aki asked, crawling to the edge of the bed (Sanford was pleased to note the dog had at some point departed their company. It had a rude habit of hoarding bed-space and it made loud noises in its sleep). “Is it for us?”

“I don’t know,” Sanford said honestly. “But you must not ask if you are not offered. This is not our home.”

“I wish Sarah lived with us.”

“That is not possible.” Sanford made an effort at neatening the bed, then gave up and left it rumpled. He watched his son huddle at the door, sniffing the aroma that came from whatever the human was cooking. He himself was perhaps a little hungry, but still nicely fed and beginning to concern himself more with how to get back behind the walls without endangering either his tactless son or the woman who had stolen them away. “Perhaps we should leave,” he said slowly.

“But after we eat, yes?”

“T’aki, come here.”

The gravity of his tone broke the hold of food, and the boy came, head cocked and curious. Sanford sat awkwardly on the bed, shifted several times, then hunkered on the floor and pulled his son onto his lap. Now he had the boy’s full attention, but he didn’t know quite how to begin. “Perhaps…we should not go back to our home in Cottonwood,” he said carefully. “I think Sarah will drive us away from this place if we ask.”

T’aki bobbed his head in a human gesture of assent, still listening and still puzzled. Of course Sarah would drive them away. She’d driven them here, hadn’t she, even without asking.

“We can live somewhere else,” he said. “And we will never go back behind the walls.”

“But we don’t have the key,” T’aki said, confused. “It doesn’t work yet.”

“No.”

“Will Sarah go and get it? Later?”

“No.”

T’aki stared at him without comprehension.

“It is a big planet,” Sanford said. “The humans cannot be everywhere. We will have a new home and it will be safer there.”

“But…it isn’t home. You said we will go to our home. On the ship.”

“Perhaps it is more important to be safe now than to go home later,” Sanford said, feeling with disquiet all the buried shadows in him that believed this and how desperately they urged the rest of him to agree.

“We’re supposed to go to the ship,” T’aki said stubbornly. “We’re supposed to go home.”

“Yes,” said Sarah suddenly from the doorway. She was standing just outside, pink with embarrassment for hearing this conversation, and for including herself in it. “You are. I’m sorry, Sanford. You’re right. What you’re doing is…is so much more important than being safe. For you or me or for anyone.”

He looked at her, his heart throbbing. “I know that isn’t easy for you to say.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whoop-de-wildebeest. Life is so hard when you have to say stuff.” She dropped her eyes and rubbed at them.

“What’s whoopee-wildebeest?” T’aki asked, puzzled.

Sanford rubbed his son’s head and set him down. “Even the smallest things matter, Sarah. Please take us home.”

“After you eat something.”

“Eat-Eat!” T’aki raced from the room.

Sarah lingered. Waiting to walk with him, he guessed, and guessed correctly as she fell into step close behind him. It was a human habit, he knew. He had often seen the guards at the wall walk together, and humans on television walking close if ever they went out walking. It didn’t necessarily mean anything.

He reached out and touched her arm with his fingertip. She started, then smiled at him and returned the gesture, finding his elbow-joint and stroking the receptive skin inside. His claspers twitched; he tightened them.

Then she let go and walked on ahead, to take food from the warmer and set it down before his son.

“What is it?” T’aki asked eagerly, tapping right at the bowl with his little claspers.

“Leftover Chinese. I kind of have to use it up, so…enjoy!”

T’aki squealed, lifted the bowl in both hands, and poured it whole into his throat, palps gnashing.

Appalled, Sanford snatched the empty bowl away and gave him a smack to the ear with it. “My son is gone!” he snapped. “Someone has sent me a Heap-rat to raise. Where are your manners?”

Sarah covered her mouth, to hide a smile, he was certain, and was grateful to her for not laughing out loud.

“I’m sorry.” Antennae flat, T’aki raised wounded eyes to his host. “It was good.”

“I’m glad you liked it,” she said in a solemn voice. “I’d have been gladder to see you like it a little slower. Drink your water.”

He did, slowly, shooting anxious glances between them until he was done.

“Good thing I saved some out for you,” Sarah said, setting a second bowl on the table (which frustratingly made it necessary for him to sit on the flat-bottomed human chair. All good for T’aki, who could climb the thing and hunker down, but Sanford had to fit himself atop it). “He just about took the paint off the walls inhaling his like that.”

Sanford glared across the table. T’aki lowered his antennae.

“Anyway, as soon as you’re ready, I figure we’ll sneak back in.” It was the animal’s turn now; she opened a can of food, added a generous amount of hard brown nuggets, and the dog came running in from across the house to eat with even less decorum than his son. “There shouldn’t be a problem. I mean, I’ve never been searched before, so—oh gross, T’aki! Don’t eat that!”

Sanford spun and there was his boy, sitting on the floor beside the dog with a handful of nuggets, palps grinding away. At his father’s expression, he dropped the nuggets hurriedly back into the dog’s bowl, but simply had to argue: “Why not?”

“It’s dog food!”

“I eat food like this.”

Pain sank hard into Sarah’s face. After a moment, she wet a cloth at the sink and came around the table to wipe T’aki’s hands and palps. “I know you do,” she said softly. “But you shouldn’t. If you’re still hungry, I can fix you something else.”

“I’m not. I just wondered what it tasted like. It’s good!”

She knelt there, her hands on T’aki’s shoulders, looking sad and helpless, then gave the boy’s face a final washing and said, “Fagin doesn’t think he gets enough food as it is. You shouldn’t ought to take it out of his bowl.”

“Oh.” Now he looked ashamed. “I’m sorry, Fagin.”

The dog did not respond, save to shake its tail and keep eating as noisily as it could.

“I bet if you pick up that ball and go wait on the sofa, he’ll come play Fetch when he’s done.”

“Can I wait outside?”

She hesitated, looking at the sky, and Sanford said, “It’s too light. You may be seen. Play inside and be careful where you throw.”

“Yes, Father.” T’aki went away, downcast.

Sarah watched him go, then dropped her cloth on the table and sat heavily. Her eyes were far away.

Sanford picked at the meat in his bowl. It did smell good, but he had no appetite.

They sat.

“You are good to him,” Sanford said.

She laughed, but not in a happy way. “Not feeding someone dog food is what I would consider a common courtesy, not to be rewarded in and of itself. This place is horrible, Sanford. And I am a horrible part of this horrible place.”

“That’s enough.”

“Don’t, Sanford. Don’t try to tell me…” One hand rose, half-covering her face without touching it. She looked away. “I’m one of them. Don’t you think I know that? I’m one of them and I’m worse than them, because I know it’s wrong and I’m…” A little water trickled from her eye, just once. She rubbed it away. “I’m doing it anyway.”

“Enough, I said.”

She looked at him, startled by the sharpness of his tone.

He ate.

After a moment, so did she, but she was mostly just picking.

“Where is your coffee machine?” he asked.

She rolled her eyes and pointed. “It’s not broken,” she told him as he turned around to study it. “I just can’t figure out how to program it.”

“So I see,” he said, examining the settings. He cleared the task-menu of its many, many time-delayed orders and held out his hand. “What would you like?”

“A caramel macchiato.” She passed him a mug. “That’s the third button on the middle section. You just drop in a caramel packet—”

“I know. Now, watch closely. Mode one. Order.”

“Oh, for crying out loud!” She smacked both hands to her face. “You have to hit mode? That’s it?!”

“—and then select base, then flavoring and then order again to complete. Just once. If you hit the button more than once—”

“It sets the timer,” she groaned behind her hands. “Yeah, I know that part. Mode. I thought you only used that to set the clock. I never would have thought of that in a million years.”

Her drink poured itself. Sanford ate the last of his morning meal.

“Something so simple,” she muttered, glaring into her cup. “I’m so stupid.”

Sanford reached across the table and thumped her on top of the head, where her ear would be if humans kept their ears in the usual place. He resumed eating.

“Fine, I’m not stupid. I’m just technologically retarded. Sheesh, you had that in less than a minute and you’re not even from this planet!”

“You’re welcome.”

“Oh.” She blinked rapidly. “Thank you. Uh…would you like some coffee?”

“Thank you. Black, no sugar.”

The meal concluded with two cups of coffee for each of them and a few sips for T’aki. Afterwards, an emotional farewell between boy and dog, and then into the dark room where the van laired, to be loaded into the rear hold under a blanket. T’aki, fed and covered over, slept on the short trip back, and no, there was no search at the gate, no trouble at all. The van did stop, but the man who came to the window did not question the obvious lump of blankets which sheltered Sanford and his sleeping son. He heard instead a low, worried voice: “I heard about last night. Are you okay?”

“Shaken, not stirred,” Sarah replied mysteriously, but the man laughed as if reassured.

“They said you tried to throw some kind of cook-out. Good for you.” A short silence, although Sarah must have communicated something because the man went on in relaxed good humor. “It took a lot of guts, but you know what they say: The first time is always the hardest. Maybe the next one will go over smoother.”

“You think there’ll be a next time?” Sarah asked.

“Not for a while, but sure, why not? They’re here to integrate, aren’t they?”

Again, Sarah made no answer, but when Sanford carefully shifted the blanket so that he could fit his eye to a tear in its fabric, he saw her smile reflected in the console-mirror. And that was all right. The man from the checkpoint gate was smiling back at her and while it was just as sincere in seeming, it struck him as distinctly less all right. He caught himself scraping his palps together and forced himself to lie still.

The man stepped away from the vehicle, although he reached out as he did so to catch the open window, anchoring himself to this continued moment. “So, yeah, I’ll let you get to it. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. And, maybe if you want, if you’re not too busy…”

“You mean if I’m not fired?” Sarah asked, still smiling although it had faded into something darker.

“Hey, if they were going to fire you, I’d be the first to know. You’re still on the list, so…” The man hung on the window, looking human and pink and ridiculous, and then suddenly, overloud, said, “You want to hang out sometime tonight?”

Sanford scraped his palps again, but Sarah’s voice covered what little sound he made with a startled, “What?”

The man let go of the window at once, his face very pink. “Well, not tonight,” he said quickly. “I’ve got a thing…but just in a casual sort of…if you didn’t have anything planned on some other night…not that I just stay home every single night—oh thank God,” he blurted as the phone at the checkpoint station rang for his attention. He retreated at a run and shut himself inside. The gate opened.

Sarah let out a stream of giggles, but only once, and it had the sound of nerves more than humor. She started driving, but as soon as she had turned onto the causeway, even that shaky laugh died. “Oh God,” she whispered, but that was all.

Sanford did not look. He would see it soon enough.

Slowly, the wheels ground and bounced along the road until finally the engines died. “This is it,” Sarah said, and came to open the door.

Her eyes were wet.

Sanford unfolded himself from the vehicle and looked around. It was not as bad as he’d feared. There were several shallow craters in the causeway where the explosive bombs had impacted, but all the houses seemed to be intact and only a few were singed. He could see charred patches of earth here and there, but no large bloodstains. He’d find out later just what casualties, if any, had ended the feast, but for himself, he was encouraged.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I hate bringing you back here. I know why I have to, but I hate it.”

“Will you come inside?” he asked, moving to open his door. “Please.”

“Sure, for a w—”

A shrill whistle and hard snap cut turned her acceptance into a flinch. Sam came briskly up the road, antennae high and in good spirits. “Nice party, huh?”

Sarah’s shoulders stiffened, but she forced her smile back on. “Hello, Mr. Samar—”

“I have to admit, when I heard you wanted to throw a block party, I didn’t really think you’d set fire to the whole fucking block,” Sam said. “You know, there are easier ways to get out of work than to cook your clients. And God knows that didn’t help the smell around here.” He took a deep breath, coughed it out theatrically and said, “Burnt bug. That is never coming out of my curtains, caseworker. Think you can order me some new ones?”

She stared at him, her mouth open slightly, then passed a hand over her face and turned around. She went without speaking to her van and drove away.

“Nice party,” Sam said again, cheerfully. “Where did you go? You missed all the fun when—”

Sanford punched him right in the soft plates between the eyes. Not a killing blow, not even by half, but enough to make himself felt, by God.

“What the fuck was that for?” Sam bellowed, grabbing at his face.

“That you can joke of cooking us while standing here in front of Baccus’s house!” Sanford spat, and little T’aki came up shrilling, “Her father died in a fire!”

Sam froze, hands still raised, but motionless. He looked back at the blackened shell of Baccus’s home, then at Sanford. “I didn’t know that,” he said awkwardly.

T’aki skreed, palps fully extending and rattling, furious in his small and earnest way. Sanford snatched him up and thumped him down inside their home, then swung on Sam again, shouting, “Did it ever occur to you that she risked her life to feed you, even you? Don’t you ever get tired of pissing on people? Zhu’kwe!”

He stalked into his house, banging the door on Sam’s silent, staring face. He picked up a broken audio-speaker, threw it down again with a curse, and then sat, staring at the empty chair where Sarah liked to sit.

* * *

She knocked on doors all morning, looking for her clients, seeing burns and broken walls, trying to find out who’d been killed. Most of them weren’t home and while this was nothing new, in the wake of Samaritan’s words, their absence took on such sinister implications that when the first door did open on someone she knew, she burst into hysterical tears. Jules Verne immediately shelved his usual sneer of greeting and pulled her inside and, in some consternation as to how to take control of the situation, poured a glass of water over her head. It worked.

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” he snapped, when she was halfway through her fourth babbling effort to explain herself. “No one died! Who told you someone died? We just got shot at, that’s all. I think a few people got their shells cracked and U’iqa’pta lost half his arm, but—oh what the fuck, woman?! It’ll grow back when he molts!” And he threw more water on her.

Eventually, he went outside, where she heard him sending out some of those high, buzzing calls, which were distantly and not-too distantly returned. When he came stomping back, he pinched her arm between two disgusted fingers and dragged her to the Heaps, where he turned her over without a word to Mr. John Byrnes.

He listened without too much obvious impatience as he stood there streaked in hot garbage-slime, covered his eyes once and rubbed his throat twice, and finally muttered, “Ko’vi the father, give me strength.” Then he looked at her. “No one’s dead,” he said.

“But—”

“We haven’t found any bodies and I know they didn’t take anyone away. They never even got out of the vans. They had their fun and they left. Sanford took his kid into hiding, but he’ll be back, if that’s what’s working you over.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to say she knew they were safe at least, but she didn’t want to have to tell him how she knew—that she’d saved two people, left all the rest to get shot. She dropped her eyes, stared hollowly and with shame at his cracked, filthy feet, and said, “People got shot. People’s houses got burnt.”

He made one of those ear-splitting snapping sounds. “You can’t do this every time they hurt someone,” he said. “Get yourself together.” He raised his hand, buzzing and clicking. Someone passed him an old thermos full of water. He gave it to her. “Drink this. I swear to your God and mine I will smack you if you say you can’t.”

She took it meekly and looked around. Hundreds of yang’ti kept working, sorting their recycled junk, cleaning up their treasures, standing in line, just relaxing. None of them appeared to take any notice of her at all, any more than they appeared to see the half-dozen IBI soldiers standing around with guns, but as she drank her warm, stale water, she realized they were looking at her. Not all of them, but a lot, and not just the ones she called her clients.

“You all right?” Byrnes asked impatiently.

She nodded.

He clicked, staring at her and sometimes scanning the crowds that choked the marketplace surrounding the Heaps, and finally said, “Okay, I’m going to say this one time and you’re going to shut up and swallow it: People die here. That doesn’t mean the rest of us stop living. We get to have good days between the bad ones. We get that. You—” His blunt, alien finger thumped down on the top of her burning head. “—get that. Hear me?”

She nodded and forced down a little more water. When the thermos was empty, he took it back and dragged her over to the shade of a used clothing stall. He sat her down without asking her and stood over her, glaring and clicking to himself.

“You going to get in trouble over last night?” he asked at last.

“Probably,” she said glumly.

He snapped his palps and stared over his shoulder at the crowds. “You got a list of the people you’re missing for that stupid census thing?”

She looked up, startled. “Um, yeah, I think so,” she said, pulling her briefcase onto her lap. She hardly had the paper in her hand before he took it away from her and stalked off.

Sarah wasn’t exactly surprised when her Mr. Fletcher came out of the crowds several minutes later to make his report, but it didn’t make her feel the way she’d once thought it would. Mr. Woodrow and Mr. Kurtz were waiting before he was done, and by the time she’d finished with them, there was a line. They didn’t stay to chat. She didn’t expect them to. There were only so many hours in the day and they needed their food chits, but they didn’t swear at her or even at the intrusiveness of the questions. Mr. Gordon waved at her before he walked away; Mr. Wells gave her an awkward sort of tap on the knee.

She was done before noon. Done. This stupid list she’d fought and stumbled over for two months, and what was IBI going to do with it except use it to find more effective ways to run their little prison? Sarah sat in the shade in the middle of the noisy market and felt like crying.

“Stop that.”

She wiped her dry eyes guiltily and snapped her briefcase shut, then looked up into the sun with Mr. Byrnes standing black and faceless in front of it. He handed her the list of clients and said, “Sanford’s back. He and the kid are fine.”

She nodded and said nothing.

Mr. Byrnes turned around and took a few steps towards the Heaps, paused, and then came back. “Twenty years from now,” he said brusquely, staring straight ahead, “no one is going to remember how that party ended. But everyone’s going to remember it happened.”

“It was a stupid thing to do,” whispered Sarah.

“Yeah, it was. You did it anyway.” He walked away and disappeared into the mountains and valleys of garbage.

Sarah stared after him for a long time, then got up and headed back down the hard-baked road to her van. She’d left it parked in front of Verne’s railroad car with the door wide open and the keys in the ignition. Someone had left a dented can of ginger ale in the driver’s seat, where it had baked all afternoon in the Kansas summer heat. She picked it up, thinking to put it down in the road for whoever wanted it, needed it, and then went ahead and opened it. She took a hot, unpleasant swallow and climbed in behind the wheel. A few people waved at her as she drove to the gate. She waved back. A few people threw trash and swore at her. She waved at them too.

She was in the right mood for self-flagellation by the time she reached the office, where news of the riot seemed to be a joke that all IBI’s soldiers were in on. They called out to her in the halls—“What smells like burnt bug?” “Nice party, Pollyanna!” “Hey, throw another bug on the barbie, it’s Fowler!”—and then went laughing on their way.

She wrote a thorough incident report, from the genesis of the idea (her own), to filing for authorization (which had been all legal and above-board), and finally the event itself, making certain she mentioned Piotr, although she cast him in a far more heroic light (Mr. Lantz tried several times to warn me of the consequences of such a gathering. He advised me in the strongest possible terms to cancel. I disregarded his advice.) Finally, a broad description of the riot itself and her ignoble flight, leaving Piotr Lantz and the brave men of the International Bureau of Immigration to mop up the dangerously violent and unpredictable bugs. She felt like throwing up when she was done.

“Ah, Miss Fowler.”

She jumped in her chair and swung around. “Mr. van Meyer! You startled me!”

“My mother would say this is the reaction of a guilty mind,” he said, folding his long hands on the cubicle wall. Piotr was nowhere to be seen.

“Your mother would be right,” she told him, and showed her incident report briefly before setting it in her Outbox.

“Ah.” He took it out, running his fingertips over it without reading. His eyes moved over the census report that had been beneath it with more interest. He reached, thumbed down through the stack, looked thoughtful.

“I still feel that I owe you an apology, Mr. van Meyer. And I owe Mr. Lantz one too. He tried to warn me and I brushed him off. Then he had to ride in and save me. I feel like a fool.”

He tsked, watching her. His expression was sympathetic enough, but it never touched his eyes, which stayed as cold and unblinking as a snake’s.

“Was anyone hurt?” she asked.

“Nee, nee. A small thing only, easily controlled. It is not necessary even to get out of the vans. No one is hurt this time.”

She nodded, took a deep breath and said it: “Do you want me to resign?”

He studied her as the air took on more and more weight, seeing every nervous shift, every shiver. “It was suggested,” he said at last. “But I am idealist. I believe there are some who can learn from their mistakes.”

She looked at him, knowing his eyes were a trap and the trap had teeth.

“And here you offer,” he mused, gazing into her. “I think you do not want to leave us, yet you offer. You must. Do you know what this is, Miss Fowler? This is integrity. Honor. Rare and precious…and not to be trusted.” He lapsed into silence, perfectly still, and then said, without warmth, “You impress me.”

“I d-do?”

“I can count on fingers of one hand—” He raised one and expressionlessly bent down three fingers. “—how many men I say this of. You impress me. In you, I see great things. So.” At once he animated, grandfatherly and smiling, reaching out to stroke an affectionate hand down her hair. “It is suggested that you must be removed and I say to these people that you must stay.” His fingers twitched over onto the stubbly side of her head, caressing her scar. “And you do wish to stay, ja? In spite of all things.”

“I like my job,” she said, fumbling out her cap and putting it on. “I want to work here, I do.”

“Ja? Ja.”

“Mr. van Meyer, this is the most important work I am ever going to do in my life, I believe that, and I’m not just…just…”

“Blowing smoke up my skirt?” He smiled. “I know you are not.”

“But I know that I screwed up and I understand if…if…”

“It is a small matter, Miss Fowler. And it is enough talk we have made about it. Now you do better, ja? No more.” He straightened up as if to go, but then turned back, smiling. “I am surprised to see you in office. I examine all checkpoint record when I come into building—old habit, Miss Fowler, like old dog, difficult to change—and I thought I see you pass Checkpoint Seventeen?”

“Yes, sir?”

He waited, still wearing that same expression of polite surprise.

“I had to go to work,” she said, genuinely puzzled.

“And this is so admirable,” he replied, his eyes boring blackly into hers. “So soon after so dangerous a thing as you see only last night, to go back in among them. Did you have no fear there must be reprisal? If bug were injured, as is only sensible to think, would he not blame young Miss Fowler who arrange the tragedy?”

“I didn’t think of that,” she said, her heart beginning to pound. Old dog, nothing. This was an old dragon and he didn’t miss a trick. “And they didn’t say anything, um, especially hostile.”

“Nee?” He glanced over at her Outbox and thumbed through the census reports again. “Indeed, they would appear to feel quite friendly toward you.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” And because that sounded so defensive, she added, “They were mostly just out at the He…the recycling station. Working. Like nothing had happened. Maybe it just wasn’t that big of a deal to them.” She could feel herself flushing, feel her stomach knotting up in sour revolt against the words in her mouth, but she made herself say them like it didn’t matter. “I drove through the causeway first, to see if I could clean up, but there was nothing left.”

“I see. Nee, there wouldn’t be. The bug take everything he can. If you had stay, in his mood, perhaps he take you too.” He gazed at her, tapping his index finger on the wall of her cubicle, then smiled and waved that off. “But you are safe and all is well. It is very glad I am to see you, Miss Fowler. Good night.”

“Thank you, sir. Good night.”

He waved that off as well, and left her for his office. Piotr Lantz still wasn’t anywhere to be seen. It unnerved her.

Sarah straightened her Outbox again, made sure the incident report was on top, and gathered up her things to go. She thought she’d gotten away with it, that this really would be an end to the whole mess, in IBI’s eyes at least. She wasn’t there in van Meyer’s office to hear him on the phone saying, “I think she is penitent, nee? Nothing more is necessary. It is enough.”

Sarah made her way out of the quiet building and across the empty parking lot. The sun was still bright and oppressive, but it was getting late. She could see the lights coming on along the containment walls and see the columns of smoke rising on the other side as those who had the means cooked whatever they’d scrounged up for dinner. The smell was at once diabolical and yet comforting. She stood for a moment beside her van, thinking of T’aki and Sanford sitting at her kitchen table and how weirdly normal that had felt, in spite of the circumstances. But there was nothing to see here and nothing more she could do, so she climbed up behind the wheel, took another sip of blisteringly-hot and now flat ginger ale, and drove away.

* * *

She stopped in at the village store for groceries, picked up a sandwich from the deli, and ate it in the cute little manicured park, watching the sun go down over the containment walls. The smell of the Heaps gradually won out over her appetite; she fed half her sandwich to the hungry IBI ducks and drove home, thinking that she would call Kate…not to complain or anything, but just to talk. About Brookings, about life, about anything, as long as she heard a friendly voice. Maybe she’d find something worth watching on TV and she and Fagin could stay up until midnight eating ice cream straight from the carton. That wasn’t pathetically lonely, was it?

She parked in the empty garage—You should hang up papers, or at least get a chair—and went around to collect her groceries from the back of the van. Really too big for just her…ate up too much gas…President Dufries was going to make all whole-gas models illegal next year anyway…but if she traded it in on a smaller car, where would she put all the aliens she was smuggling in and out of Cottonwood?

Smiling, she went into the kitchen. She put her bags down on the counter, called Fagin, opened up the fridge, and something black came down over her head and cinched tight.

Her hoarse yelp of alarm ended in an explosion of white dots as she was slammed three times into the freezer door, then thrown to the ground. She kicked—not so blindly; the sack on her head was tight-weave, but enough to breathe through and enough to see, very fuzzily, the black shape of her attacker against the light from the open refrigerator—and he grabbed her foot and drove his fist against the long muscle of her thigh.

The pain was exquisite, an instant charley horse. She yelled again and scrambled back, straight into the wall, hard enough to knock her jaws together. Taste of blood in her mouth; she’d bitten her tongue.

The black shape came swooping down, grabbing her, throwing her. She landed, rolled flat on her back and kicked again as he came at her, the kind of lucky shot that only happens in the movies. Both feet hit square in his stomach—hard stomach, no give at all; this was a flak vest—and sent him flying into the dining room table. She rolled onto her hands and knees, launched herself into a run, and banged into the arm of the sofa.

She went down and he came after, kicking and stomping on her. His boots were huge, hard…combat boots. She rolled, screaming and thrashing, but his boots kept coming, like she was a cockroach he was trying to kill. She felt her ribs crack, screamed and curled, and caught the boot in her belly over and over until something like fire exploded in her guts and she couldn’t scream anymore.

It got quiet. She thrashed on the floor, both hands slapping and knotting at her stomach where lava churned, hardly able to breathe for the agony of trying, but unable to lie still. She knew he was still there, just standing and watching, but if she’d had a gun in her hands, she couldn’t have found the willpower to aim and fire it. All that mattered was her stomach and the venomous nightmare thing eating its way out of her.

Then he had her by the ankles, dragging her out into the center of the room. He dropped her, walked two steps in his heavy boots, and dropped suddenly atop her, his knees on either side of her chest. She shrieked, knowing only that he was on her, his weight like an acid spear in her broken guts. She scarcely heard the low purr of his zipper.

Light, splashing in the living room window. His hand slapped down over her mouth and pressed, muffling the worst of her hoarse, spastic cries. A car outside, in her driveway, idling. Someone got out.

He said one word then, his first word, his only word: “Fuck.”

It was enough.

Someone knocked three times, light and cheerful, on her front door.

He got up, letting her snap onto her side in a convulsive curl, and ran out the back.

Outside in her driveway, a woman’s voice: “Joe? This is the wrong house. See, 3182? Gavi’s in 3128.” Embarrassed laughter. Car door. The headlights, rolling away.

Sarah pulled at her head, fingers plucking as she writhed until she managed to loosen the cord and pull the sack away. She shoved it aside, climbed to her knees, and threw up half a sandwich and kind of a lot of blood. She couldn’t look at that. She tried to call Fagin, could only manage a groan. Her stomach, her stomach, what did he do to her?

She couldn’t stand up. She crawled to the back door on her hands and knees, pushed it shut, locked it. Pointless, she knew, but—

The backyard light was on, catching the reflective tape on Fagin’s collar. He was hanging up by it, hanging on a fencepost, and he was…he was…

Sarah screamed again, the sound no more than a caw of disbelief and anguish. She shouldn’t have done it; agony popped in her like a bubble. She fell on her face, hands digging at the floor, sobbing.

‘Get out,’ some cold, rational part of her thought. ‘Get out right now, while you still can. You know damn well who that was. You know he’s coming back.’

Sarah crawled. Out through puddles of milk and melting ice cream. Out onto the cool concrete garage floor. Into the van, a climb that brought her twice right to the metallic edge of unconsciousness. Her keys were still in her pocket; taking them out took a lifetime. She opened up the garage door and drove.

The outer gate of IBI’s community village wasn’t manned, just an electronic barrier with a card-reader, but she had to crank down her window by hand and then stretch out over her broken ribs to do this. The card fell from her fingers when she was done. She stared at it, sobbing, then left it in the street and fled.

‘Just come home,’ Kate had said. ‘Don’t call me, don’t fight, don’t storm out on anyone, just leave.’ And she wanted to now, she did, but she hadn’t gone a mile before she knew she wasn’t going anywhere. Her guts were burning and getting worse. She could feel her stomach swelling. She thought she might have peed herself, but was afraid to look down and see bloodstains on her jeans. She thought she might really be hurt.

Hospital. Not IBI’s medical wing, but the real hospital in Wheaton. She drove down streets she barely saw, ran two stop signs and a red light, and had a cop on her tail she didn’t even see when she finally careened in through the emergency entry and banged up onto the curb to a stop. She waited there, curled around the steering wheel and drifting out of consciousness, to be found. ‘Just come home,’ Kate said.

But now it was too late.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

She didn’t come back. Not the next day and not the day after. When the third day came and went without Sarah, Sanford threw down the human computer he’d been restoring and went outside.

T’aki sat in the dirt with his toy ship, not playing, not even watching the road anymore, but just sitting. Sanford sat beside him. They watched the early afternoon wind blow clouds over Cottonwood. It had stormed fairly impressively this morning. He thought it might storm again later tonight, but for now, the skies behind the drifting clouds were blue.

“Did they make her stop coming?” T’aki asked finally.

“I don’t know.”

“Did they see us in the van?”

“I don’t think so.” Or they would have come for us as well, he thought, but did not say.

T’aki crawled into his lap. He rubbed the boy’s head and watched clouds move. The sky was infinite today, blue and clear and inviting.

Footsteps on the causeway. He glanced over and saw Sam coming toward him with three cans of beer dangling from plastic rings. A peace offering. He wanted to spit, but he had his son on his lap. He ignored Sam instead, ignored him while he was walking and ignored him when he stood at Sanford’s feet. The clouds crawled, rolling into shapes and out of them again.

“What am I supposed to do?” Sam said at last, crossly. “Paint my shell with ashes and beg for forgiveness?”

Sanford said nothing, but T’aki ground his tiny palps twice and blew air rudely through them.

Sam switched his glare to the boy. “You know, if she liked you, she wouldn’t give a damn what I said. She’d be here right now, if she really liked you. You’re nothing but a job to her and as soon as she walks out that gate, she forgets you were ever born.”

T’aki stared, trembled, then jumped up with a shrill skree and ran inside, his toy ship clutched to his shell. Sanford let him go, listened to the muffled squalling from the rear room, and then looked up at Sam and spread his arms. “What else is left?” he asked. “Just kick him next time. Tell him, oh, tell him his father never wanted an egg and that Ko’vi hates him.”

Sam snapped away a beer and threw it at him. It bounced hard off his chest and rolled away. “I’m supposed to feel bad because your boy is making friends with the enemy? Fuck you!”

“Sarah Fowler is not the enemy.”

“She’s in it for herself, like all of them. She’s just too stupid to join their soldiers, so she prances around with paper instead, but she’s still one of them. She’s human and she’s IBI.”

“She’s a good person.”

“Sure she is. And when it all went bad at that stupid party she threw together, your good person took off and saved her own soft hide. Did you explain that to your boy when you were running from the fire bombs?”

“Would it have made you feel better to see her killed by them?”

Sam opened another beer and poured half into his throat. He sat down in the road facing him, out of kicking range, and glared. Inside, T’aki’s squalls had tapered off, but his heartsick cries still tugged at the air. Sam drank after each, palps snapping, and when the beer was gone, he bounced the empty can off Sanford’s chest and said, “Do you know the one thing that made you worth knowing?”

“I can fix your guns.”

Sam snorted through his palps. “You’re not the only mechanic in this piss-ditch and you’re sure not the best of them. No, what makes your so-called company just tolerable is that you’re still yang’ti after all this time. You never settled in. You still see this place for what it is and you still remember who you are. You know better than to trust a human.”

“Because they’re all evil, is that it? And we’re all good?”

“Because she’s IBI, you dumb bug! Every human who walks in through that fucking gate is IBI! She works for them! The only reason she’s here to hum in my ear all damn day, talking about what’s right and wrong, is because they pay her to do it.” Sam twisted around and spat chaw. “She can’t help. The best she could do was that stupid party and look how it ended!”

“No one was killed.”

“That’s the only thing you can say, isn’t it? You know, I’m old enough to remember going to a lot of parties where no one getting killed was not just a good outcome, it was more or less the only outcome.” He opened his last beer and started drinking, not tasting, but just pouring it in.

“She tried to take a little of the desperation out of our lives for one night,” Sanford said.

“Yeah? And now they only feel more desperate, don’t they?”

“What is wrong with you?” Sanford asked disgustedly. “What had to break inside you to make any of those arguments sound sensible in what passes for your head? She risked her life for us. Are you so far gone that you can’t even see that? Or are you so far gone that you see it and just don’t care?”

Sam recoiled and then only sat there, even his palps and antennae perfectly still.

A shadow fell over them.

Sanford looked around, one hand tensely drawn up. He hadn’t heard anyone approach, and it took several seconds before recognition set in and he was able to put a name to the yang’ti hesitating towards them.

Baccus. Of all people. Baccus.

He got up, and she stopped walking, her antennae dancing nervously on her head. She had something in her hand and she held it out now. Grey papers, pressed together. A human news-sheet.

“They were reading it at the Heap-station,” she said, as Sanford took it. “I thought…you might like to know.” She looked around, hands wringing, then ran back the way she’d come and was soon gone.

Sanford unfolded the papers, squinting at the narrow crush of human lettering. The news-sheet wasn’t fresh, and the ink had smudged, making a difficult task that much more difficult, but with patience, he could puzzle their words out. War in Syria. Gas tax expected to rise. President Dufries to sign new environment reform bill. He clicked to himself, turned the papers over, and there was Sarah’s picture: a bloody face, unconscious, pressed between two strangers, and the words IBI Worker Critical After Attack.

“What is it?” Sam asked, fetching the beer he’d thrown at Sanford.

A woman is in critical condition at Sacred Heart Medical Center following a violent assault in her home Monday night. Sarah Fowler, 24, is one of hundreds of new employees at the International Bureau of Immigration’s Cottonwood, where she works as a social services liaison to the residents. Fowler’s attack is only the latest in a string of bug-related violence worldwide that leaves many residents of the local community concerned for their own safety.

A hospital spokesperson had no comment when asked if Fowler was able to identify her attackers, but did say that the possibility of a bug perpetrator has not been ruled out. Fowler received several serious injuries to the chest and abdomen consistent with powerful kicks or blows, the most critical of which has resulted in a ruptured liver and other internal injuries. Fowler underwent surgery shortly after her arrival at Sacred Heart and is listed in critical condition.

A spokesperson from IBI has issued a statement expressing concern over the attack and that they remain interested in working with Sacred Heart to see that Fowler receives the best medical care. “The residents of Cottonwood are closely monitored and policed, and how a violent individual could have escaped to attack Miss Fowler in her home is our paramount concern at this time,” said IBI liaison Metcalf Hayes. “We’re hoping [Fowler] will soon be stable enough to answer some questions. In the meantime, stronger measures—

The article was continued elsewhere. Sanford did not chase it down. He stared at the photograph, at Sarah’s slack and whitened face until Sam took the news-sheets away. Then he walked blindly to the corner of his house and leaned on it, staring into the open fields that lay beyond the causeway.

He’d known better. Even if she hadn’t, he’d known better. She thought that she could face down the soldiers of IBI and fight them back with pieces of paper and bold lies, that she could apologize for it later and be forgiven. He’d known better, and he’d let her do it anyway.

‘But she’s human,’ he thought, and covered his eyes. ‘I thought they’d come for us, not her. She’s one of their own. She’s not supposed to be in danger.’

And he’d known better than that the instant she put him in her van and took him to her home. And still he said nothing. He let her play the part of the humble penitent to the dark voice on the telephone and he ate her food and he never even tried to warn her.

“Jesus Christ,” Sam said tightly. “Ruptured…liver? What the hell is that?”

“I have to see her,” Sanford heard himself say. His hand scraped into a fist and punched futilely at the metal wall. See her? The picture in the news-sheet was as close as he would ever get. He may never see her again.

“Liver,” Sam muttered, tearing back paper to find the article’s end. “That can’t be as important as it sounds, can it? Liver…What is this? Who cares about the fucking bugs? Why aren’t they talking more about the human with a fucking ruptured liver?”

“I have to see her,” Sanford said again, just as uselessly.

“Yeah? How much money do you have?” And when he looked at him, Sam clicked hard and snapped, “Do you have any money? Human money, not chits, and if it isn’t at least a few thousand, don’t even bother saying yes.”

“Yes,” he said.

“All right.” Sam seemed to relax, only slightly. “I know a guy. A human in the Heap-station. He’ll get you started. It probably won’t come to anything,” he added, wadding the news-sheets savagely and tossing them in the ditch. “But without him, you’ve got no chance at all.”

“A chance at what?”

“It was in the tiny print in some of the papers they made us sign back in Fairfield. I keep telling you, read everything. Now they’ll probably deny it’s there, but I’ve never seen them take it back, so you just keep staring them down. It’s called a visa,” Sam said, just as he was getting ready to lose his temper. “And assuming they don’t shoot you just for asking, you’re going to have to buy it.”

“A visa,” Sanford echoed clumsily. “What does it do?”

“It lets you out,” Sam said and spat chaw. “Under guard. For an hour or two. They won’t let you touch her. I’m not even sure they’ll let you close enough to talk to her. You still want one?”

“Yes,” said Sanford.

Sam nodded, already turning around. “Then get your money and let’s go. Nobody with anything called a ruptured liver has time for you to fuck around.”

* * *

It took three days to arrange a two-hour pass for himself and T’aki. He turned every food chit he’d hidden below into human money, taking a ninety-percent loss in the exchange, just to be sure he’d have enough for the necessary bribes. They didn’t take it all (five hundred dollars to Sam’s ‘friend’ at the Heap-station, fifteen hundred to his friend in IBI’s visa department, and a grueling three thousand to the man who made the final approval), but they took everything they thought he had and then made him wait two more days without telling him anything.

But in the end, it went through, which Sanford had more than half-expected it would not. Before dawn on the sixth day, they came for him, bursting in as for an arrest and laughing at him for throwing up his arms and dropping to his knees.

“You Fred Sanford?” one of them asked.

“And Son,” another added, and they all laughed.

“I am,” said Sanford. He kept his arms up, his hands behind his head, and watched the first man consult his papers. It was a man he knew, a man he’d last seen at Sarah’s block party, knocking her to the ground.

“So you want to see your caseworker,” the man drawled. “That’s so sweet.”

Laughter.

“Well, you’re lucky, bug.” The human folded the papers and tucked them away. “Because I want to see her too. You have no idea how much. If I’d known you roaches could still get a fucking visa, I’d have written one up for you the first day. Let’s go.”

They took him to an armored van, him and T’aki, where they painted both their chests through a stencil in white paint with throat-stinging fumes, stamped the visa six times and finally allowed them to board. They sat in the back with the grinning guard while two other guards rode up front. T’aki was just as excited to ride as he’d been in Sarah’s vehicle. He kept wanting to hop up and look out every window, wanting to know if every building he saw lit up in the darkness was the hospital. Sanford kept his answers short, as if preoccupied, perhaps even angry. He was neither. He was, in fact, very alert and aware of the guard he did not dare to stare at, the guard who had punched a stack of solid ice the last time he’d seen him this close.

T’aki had brought a plant, a little scrub of grass he’d found growing near the aqueduct. He’d packed it carefully in an empty can, which he’d wrapped in paper and painted. He held it against his chest, protective, patting it now and then in his excitement. He had asked ten times at least if Sanford thought it might flower soon. Sanford eventually stopped answering, because he did not know and because any answer he gave made the guards laugh harder.

“They’ll never let that filthy thing in a hospital,” one of those up front said.

“No, they won’t,” agreed the driver. “But they might take the grass if he ties a ribbon on it.”

And they laughed.

After that, T’aki sat quietly, keeping his head down and stroking at the thin, green blades.

The hospital was a much bigger building than Sanford expected, and even so early in the day, was crowded with humans. He’d never seen so many of them who didn’t carry weapons.

But the ones who did were enough. They parked up close to the doors, opened the van, and immediately raised a commotion of gasps and shouts and screams from the other humans. Sanford was ordered down; he knelt and let his ankles be fastened to a hobbling rod, and his arms bound behind him, none too gently. They tried to do the same to T’aki, but had neglected to bring binders small enough, and so in the end settled for tying a collar around his son’s neck and fastening that to Sanford’s waist.

And they took the plant. Perhaps only to get at his son’s little wrists at first, but in response to his leaping and loud protests, they took it all the way away, laughing, and threw it in a bin.

“Now shut up,” the guard said, as T’aki skreed. “Or I’ll march both your butts back in the van. This ain’t the roach motel anymore.”

“Quiet,” Sanford said. “Behave yourself. Be quiet.”

“He took my—”

“I will send you home myself. Be quiet.”

T’aki was, his antennae flat in silent anger, snapping his palps in complaint. Sanford answered them with low clicks, the best he could do, and his son eventually quieted. A tap to the back from the butt of the guard’s gun prompted him to his feet and he started walking.

Humans scattered ahead of him, some only darting back to watch from a safer distance, others in full screaming flight out of the building. The guard enjoyed this as well, playing to his audience by shoving Sanford, yanking on his binders, calling out orders and accompanying them with blows from his gun’s butt, just as though Sanford were a dangerous beast that needed breaking. He resisted none of it and kept his eyes averted as he was taken through the crowded halls, up a metal shaft, and along the acrid-smelling corridors, past rooms filled with machinery and sleeping humans. It did not look like a medical bay to Sanford, but a place of experimentation, of killing. He prayed appearances were deceiving. They often were, with humans.

“What the hell is this?” A human male in white, stinking of fear and adrenaline, stormed over just in time to distract the guard from keeping T’aki on the ground with the butt of his gun. “Get those…things out of here!”

“They have a pass,” their guard said, shouldering his gun.

“I don’t care if they have the crown jewels of fucking France! Get them out! This is a hospital! I’m not going to have those disease-ridden parasites in my hospital!”

Sanford kept his head bent, trying to sort the scents of this awful place with furtive flashes of his claspers, needing to know which room was hers.

“Your hospital, huh?”

“I’m not arguing with you, get your bugs and get out!”

“I ain’t arguing either. They got a pass. That means my job is seeing they get their time on that pass,” the guard went on, talking straight over the other human’s angry stammers. He was enjoying this. Good. Any prey would satisfy a stupid man, and as long as it was human, it was not his son. “I like my job. I like it well enough to shoot the guts out of college-boys who want to give me shit over it. Are you giving me shit?”

Anger. Fear. Mean enjoyment. Stink of chemicals. Stink of men. Sanford waited, wishing she would sing.

“You’ve got five minutes,” the white-clothed human said. “Five. Then I want you all out of here or I call the cops.” He backed away, pointing at them with his short human hands. “All of you! Fucking bugs!”

T’aki snapped angrily. Sanford hushed him.

“All righty, roaches,” said their guard, in a good mood as only one like him could be. Not as good as if he’d been able to crack a head or shoot someone, but good. He continued on down the halls, smirking at the guards who came skulking out to watch them, until he found the door he wanted. “Knock-knock, Pollyanna,” he called, boldly pushing it open. “You got visitors. Christ, every time I see you, you just look more and more beautiful.”

The pleasure in his voice was as good as a warning. Sanford braced himself and went inside.

Sarah lay in a small bed, surrounded by machines, most of them shut off, as if medics had given up on her healing. They’d put her in an oversized wrap from which her arms and head jutted like two sticks and a rock from a snowbank. Her skin stank of blood and chemicals, and had been dotted by bandages. Her face—swollen, cut, ghastly with damage—stretched into an expression of horror when she saw him.

“What…” She struggled to sit up, caught at her belly with a grimace, and then just stared at him. “What are you doing here?”

T’aki leapt up, jerking Sanford roughly around at the end of the tether. He stared out the window while his son jabbered in Sarah’s embrace, telling her how they’d seen her in the papers, telling her about all the lights on the street driving up here, telling her he’d tried to bring a plant and the mean man—

“Aw, they got rules here, jellybean,” Sarah interrupted, as the ‘mean man’ stuck his head around the door. “The hospital wants you to buy their plants, not bring your own. Besides, I’m sure it was pretty, but you—” She wrapped herself around T’aki and rocked him while he chirped with delight, suffocated in Sarah. The boy didn’t see her face, contorted by pain in this embrace. He knew only her touch. “You are the best present. And you really didn’t have to come. I’ll be back soon.” She smiled, scrabbling her fingers all over T’aki’s chest. Tickles, she called that. It distracted the boy, that was enough. “I’d better, anyway. I’ve used up all the vacation days I have for, like, a year. I’ll be back. Oh, easy! Easy, jellybean, that’s tender.”

“I’ll bet it is. Just have to watch your step for a while, eh, beautiful?” The guard at the door laughed. “Make sure you don’t walk into any more doors? Fall down some more stairs? Or did you trip over your fat mouth?”

Sarah still smiled, but wanly now. Sanford watched the window, watched her pat T’aki’s head, then lift him up and set him down on the floor.

“How could you fall on your mouth?” T’aki asked, baffled.

“I didn’t, jellybean.”

“Oh yeah?” The guard grinned, showing rows of bony teeth. “What did happen? I’m dying to know.”

“Something just as stupid, I’m sure,” Sarah said. She spoke without hesitance, staring boldly at the guard who grinned at her. “I came home while some guys were robbing my place. I’d left the back door open…for my dog.”

“Oh yeah?” The grin widened. “Some guys?”

“I didn’t get a good look at them, but there had to have been more than one. Worked me over pretty good, didn’t they?”

T’aki looked at her, at Sanford, at her. He backed up and tugged lightly at his tether, wanting to be picked up. Sanford ignored him. ‘Be quiet,’ his soft clicks said, and T’aki, mercifully, was.

“Oh, I don’t know,” the guard said. “You could look a lot worse.”

Silence, for a short while.

“They get anything?” the guard asked.

“No. A car pulled in…just turning around, but it scared them off. They split, didn’t take anything.” She paused. “Typical thugs. They’re all cowards at heart.”

‘Oh, be quiet!’ thought Sanford, rigid with dread. Did she think she was safe just because she was here? Did she really believe the other humans in this place would defend her if this man chose to raise the weapon he carried so casually and fire it right into her fearless face?

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” the guard said coolly. “They shot your dog, I hear.”

Another tug at the tether. Sanford raised his bound hands and T’aki crawled beneath them. Now and then, he trembled.

“I heard they hung it up on a fence post and shot it ‘till it looked like, oh, fur and ground chuck.” He whistled, long and low, a mocking sound in any language. “I’d call that pretty bold. Hell, bold bastards like that, they might even come back.”

“If only you’d been there, Mr. Lantz,” said Sarah in a tight voice. “You could have chased them off for me.”

“Well…” He came over to the bed, smiling, to stroke his hand along her bruised cheek. “I can promise you I’ll be keeping a close eye on you from now on. I wouldn’t want you to get hurt again. That would be just tragic.”

She stretched her mouth in the shape of a smile.

“Mm.” Another grin, flashing white in the window. Then, “You got three minutes, buggies,” and he leaned up against the doorjamb to watch them.

Three minutes. Sanford ticked at the seconds to get a measure of them, then turned around and looked directly at her. After a moment, she returned his gaze. Her eyes were damp.

“The boy wanted to come,” Sanford said. “He doesn’t know better.”

‘I am not your friend,’ he thought. ‘You have no friends in Cottonwood.’

T’aki drew back, staring at him in dismay.

“Come here a sec, jellybean. Check this out.” Sarah turned on the television monitor mounted on the wall above Sanford’s head and gave T’aki the controller. “Put it right to your ear,” she said, smiling. “Right on it, okay?”

T’aki did, fascination in every twitch and stutter of his antennae as he stared raptly at the screen above, sound no doubt trumpeting through his head and chest as if by magic, overwhelming every other sound.

“He’s a kid,” Sarah said in a low voice, watching T’aki wring his hands and chirr at the monitor. Her voice was cold as well, cold but strained. “And no, kids don’t know better. But you do.” She looked at him with her damp eyes, only at him and not at the door where the guard waited, listened. “And just because you can use your cute kid to abuse the system doesn’t make it right. I d-duh-don’t w-want you here, you…bug!” She clapped her hands over her eyes and pressed them in hard. “What are you doing here?” she whispered, and that at least was honest. It almost bled in the air. “What are you doing here?”

He watched her fight in perfect silence to smooth her breath, to keep the water in her eyes and not on her face. He watched, and when she had settled, more or less, he said, “We were robbed.”

“Some of that going around,” the guard watching them agreed.

Sarah nodded once and looked at T’aki. She reached out in a hopeless sort of way to touch his son’s back, but T’aki didn’t feel it. He watched, all eyes and wonder, as humans on the small monitor created fire from their bare hands and threw it into the snarling face of a huge, fanged monster. “Did they take anything important?” she asked. “I guess I can make some phone calls while I’m here.”

“They took our radio,” said Sanford.

She looked at him, her eyes over-bright. Of course she knew he had no radio.

“It is the only thing I have of any value and I want it back,” he said. He could not be more clear than that, not without great risk. “I want it back.”

Her eyes shifted to the guard in the doorway, then dropped. She touched T’aki again, stroking the high curve of the back of his head, unfelt.

“Yeah, the little ones are cute, huh?” The guard, distracted by something the human medics were doing elsewhere in the hall, leaned out to watch them, then spat unselfconsciously on the floor. “Tell you what, Pollyanna, since I didn’t get you flowers, I’ll see if I can get you a baby bug when you get back.”

Sanford stiffened. Sarah closed her eyes.

“I bet you could teach it to fetch a ball if you tried. What do you say, little man?” The guard strolled jovially over and plucked the earpiece off T’aki’s head. “Want to go home with the princess here and live with her?”

T’aki’s eyes grew huge and round. He sprang up, bouncing on the bed in his excitement. “Oh yes-yes! Can I, father?”

Sanford said nothing. Sarah’s eyes, shut, leaked water in trickles down her soft cheek.

“That’ll be so much fun, huh?” The guard cupped T’aki’s head in his hand and gave it a rough shake. “Get you a collar and a license and a big red ball!”

Sarah took a deep, wet breath and let it out slowly. She opened her eyes. Her mouth smiled. “Thank you so much for coming to see me, Mr. Lantz,” she said.

“No problem, princess. I enjoyed it. Come on, buggies. Time to go home.”

T’aki climbed down from the bed reluctantly. “Goodbye, Sarah!”

“Bye, honey.” A ragged breath. She said, “I’ll be back soon and I’ll deal with you then, Mr. Sanford, all right? You people. You…aliens from outer space.”

My all-time favorite, she’d called that one. The one she would give anything to see again.

“Get out,” Sarah said strengthlessly. She lay down in the bed and faced away.

Sanford left, taking T’aki close behind him. The guard gave him a slap to the back as he came out into the hall, a hard slap. “Tough break, buggie. I could have told you it was all a waste. But a fun morning out, huh?”

Sanford said nothing. He went quietly back down through the screams and stink of the hospital, and into the armored van, which was by then something of a haven. He sat on the bench, leaning forward to alleviate some of the strain of his bonds, clicking wordless comfort at T’aki now and then, in between firm commands to sit still, to behave. They would not be out of danger until they were home and the guards away. They would not be out of danger even then.

But he felt better for having seen her, not unconscious and surrounded by strangers as she’d been in the news-sheet, but sitting up, holding his son, making her hurt attempts at a smile. He only wished she hadn’t felt it necessary to call him a bug. It didn’t bother him to hear it…but she was in enough pain.

* * *

The ‘good stuff’ at Sacred Heart wasn’t anywhere near as good as the stuff in IBI’s medical wing, but pain, Sarah soon discovered, had anesthetizing properties of its own. She had no idea how much time had passed since the attack. Directly across from her bed, mounted at eye-level on the wall where she could not but see it anytime her eyes were open, was a whiteboard with the date helpfully printed on it each morning by the nurse on duty, but the numbers made no sense to her. If the whiteboard told her it was a Thursday, that was fine, but the next time she looked at it, it would be Thursday all over again, for the first time. She couldn’t remember what day it had been when Piotr attacked her in her kitchen. She couldn’t count the days she had been lying in this bed looking at that whiteboard. She slept until the pain woke her up and lay awake until the exhaustion was enough to let her sleep past the pain, and those were her days.

Gradually, other impressions began to make themselves known. Thirst came first. The nurses brought her ice chips to suck on, which didn’t help at all. Sometimes she hid the cup under the blankets until the ice melted and she could drink the swallow or so of lukewarm water this deception yielded (and puke it promptly back up again, as often as not), but it wasn’t really worth the effort and the nurses scolded her whenever they caught her. The not-so-good stuff made her stupidly sensitive to being scolded, but just knowing intellectually that she was overreacting did not stop her from bawling all over herself at every sharp word that came her way.

After a few more uncountable days, they started bringing her drinks and soft foods that sat in her stomach like hot iron, when she could keep them down at all. They made her sit up all day, even when she cried, and with the help of a thoroughly unsympathetic therapist, she was soon walking herself to the bathroom and back. Ultimately, she was able to look at the whiteboard, see that it was a Thursday and know that yesterday had been Wednesday and tomorrow would be Friday, but her days were still little more than one long fog, broken by blood-pressure cuffs and electronic pinging, with pain the only anchor holding her to life.

She received a few dozen cards—mostly from people she worked with, some from complete strangers—and a handful of floral arrangements, including a massive spray of  lilies and roses from Mr. van Meyer. Sanford wasn’t her only visitor, although he was definitely the best of them. Even during her worst days, when she could barely think, much less speak, she was vaguely aware of people coming and going around her. As her condition improved, the nurses would periodically come in to tell her that so-and-so from Channel Such-and-Such or The Blah-Blah Paper was downstairs and did she want to talk to them, but she never did, and by the time of Sanford’s surprise visit, they had stopped altogether. Found some other ambulance to chase, she supposed, and was glad of it. The only one she had to talk to was the cop.

He came soon after Sanford left, so soon that she wondered if maybe the hospital was trying to arrest her for bringing in a bug, but no. He said he was there to take her statement. About the attack, he had to amplify when she continued to stare at him in confusion. So she told him essentially the same story she’d told Piotr, with little embellishment and only when prompted by direct questions. She’d left the door to the backyard open for her dog. She’d come home after dark, seeing nothing unusual, suspecting nothing. Someone had covered her head from behind. She had been beaten until she fell to the floor and then kicked. She thought there had been more than one person, but she hadn’t seen them. Someone had knocked on the door (and no, she didn’t know them either) and her attackers had run off. She crawled to the van, drove to the hospital, and that was all there was to the story.

He brought out his paz and referred to it often as she talked, but didn’t appear to be making any notes. “You can’t describe them at all?” he asked when she was done.

“No, sir.”

“Male? Female? Black? White?” He pulled a chair over and sat down, making it clear that he had nowhere else to be. “Human?”

“Of course they were human! What else would they be?”

“You were at Cottonwood.”

“Yeah, but I was at home. The immigrants never leave the containment area.”

“Uh huh.” He did not pretend to look convinced. “So, three assailants.”

“Maybe. Maybe only two. I didn’t see them.”

“So how do you know there were three?”

“It felt like three when they were kicking me. I wasn’t exactly counting them, though. That’s why I said, ‘Three, I think,’” she added waspishly. “You might want to be writing this down.”

“I will as soon as you give me something to write,” he countered. “Do you have any enemies?”

“No.”

“Do you work directly with the bugs?”

“Yes.”

That, he wrote down.

“Why didn’t you dial 99 from the house when you realized how badly you’d been hurt?” he asked.

“I wasn’t thinking. I was just trying to get away.”

“IBI has a world-class medical facility right on-site,” he said. His eyes were like bullets. “They were two minutes away at most. Instead, you drove thirty-three miles to Wheaton’s pissant branch of Sacred Heart.”

“I wasn’t thinking. I can barely even remember that night. I’m sure I wasn’t rational.”

“You’re sure. And are you sure you didn’t see who did it?”

She shook her head stubbornly.

“Did they say anything? Could you tell if they were male or female from their voices?”

“No. They never made a sound.”

“So, just to be sure I’ve got this straight, you came home and maybe three people grabbed you from behind, covered your head, and commenced to kicking the shit out of you without saying one word. You still can’t think of who this might be or what they might have wanted?”

“I’m sorry it doesn’t make sense. I’m sure most violent crimes do.”

“Lady, I get paid the same whether you’re a smart-ass or not.” The cop snapped his paz shut and glared at her. “You know, if it had been me getting beat to death on my kitchen floor, I’d want the guys responsible caught. Call me crazy. You sure you can’t remember anything useful?”

She had nothing to say to him. At last he let her go. She got the feeling he was a little disgusted with her, but just then the nurse came with another tray full of molten lead for her to eat, this time in the disguise of chicken soup and ice cream, so she couldn’t spare the strength to care.

When the nurse woke her for a phone call later that evening, Sarah assumed it was the cop with some follow-up insinuations. In no mood to field them, she put on her best I’m-drugged-and-at-death’s-door voice as she took the handset and mumbled, “Hello.”

Kate’s voice, however tinny through this cheap phone, nevertheless gave her sleepy brain a slap. “What the hell happened? And why the hell did I hear about it from Bob in the goddamn breakroom? No, don’t even bother! You don’t call, you don’t answer my messages…apparently, you don’t think I need to know when my baby sister has to have emergency friggin’ surgery!”

“It’s not that ba—”

“Don’t you dare tell me it’s not that bad!” Kate shouted, loudly enough to make static pop through the earpiece. “Do you think I’m stupid enough to talk to you before talking to the goddamn nurse? I know exactly how bad this is and…and you know what? Forget it. I don’t even know why I called. I’m getting in my car—”

“You don’t have to—”

“—and I’m driving right the hell to Kansas and if I can find one unbruised inch on your body, I’m punching it!”

“Kate—”

“Why haven’t you called? Exactly how long was I supposed to wait before you got around to that? The last thing I hear is how you got knocked around and then nothing for two weeks?! What the hell is wrong with you, Sarah? Didn’t they ever ask if there was someone they should call?”

“Yes, but—”

“But what? But nothing, that’s what! But more of your stubborn bullshit! No, go ahead, but I’m warning you, this had better be the best ‘but’ I’ve ever heard in my damn life or I’m coming down there, I swear to God!”

“I didn’t want them to know I had a sister.”

Silence, apart from Kate’s breathing.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “I got caught up at work and then…and then this happened. I was going to call as soon as I got home, I swear.” That sounded exactly as weak as it was and all she could manage to shore it up with was, “The doctor says I’m recovering nicely.”

The sound of Kate throwing her keys noisily onto the kitchen table jangled over the line. “You’re giving me an ulcer. I can actually feel the ulcer happening. Do you have any idea what that feels like?”

Sarah opened her mouth to say no, but that she had whole new levels of understanding on what a ruptured liver felt like…and wisely shut it again.

“So.” More rustling and thumping on Kate’s end. “Any idea when you’re getting out?”

“They haven’t said. A couple more weeks, I guess.”

“Are you going home?”

“Yes,” said Sarah, and only after her sister’s sharp sigh of relief and whispered, “Thank God!” did she realize that Kate hadn’t said, ‘Are you going home?’ but ‘Are you coming home?’ And that was very different. “To my home,” she amended timidly. “In Cottonwood.”

Another silence, longer this time.

“What’s it going to take?” Kate asked finally. “How bad does it have to get before you walk away?”

“They need me.”

“Godammit, I need you! We’re family, Sarah! I don’t care what you think you’re doing out there, you’re all I’ve got! Doesn’t that mean anything to you anymore?”

The same argument, virtually word for word, that she’d used when Sarah was loading up the van to leave home, only now she didn’t have to add, “You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re going to get hurt,” because she was already hurt.

“The nurse is coming back,” Sarah said, even though the nurse was nowhere in sight. “I have to go.”

“Fine. Call me when you get out. Oh, and I left, like, a hundred messages on your paz for when you get home. Just ignore them,” Kate added with one last twist of the familiar knife. “You will anyway.”

Click. Dead air.

Sarah hung up and put the phone on the rolling stand for the nurse to take away the next time she came through on her rounds. She turned off her light, but even with the help of the drugs in her IV line, she didn’t go to sleep for a long, long time.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The first day back at work felt like it was coming a month too soon, which was probably not too far from the truth. During her stay in the hospital, Sarah had found it weirdly comforting to think of her pain like a pregnancy—a solid, heavy, separate thing she carried in her belly, something she presently nurtured but which would not last forever—but it was no longer the worst pain. Now that she was on her feet and walking, the worst pain came just from breathing. The doctors had pulled her ribs into alignment with compression tape, but then they’d taken it off, saying they’d heal just fine on their own in six weeks or so, which fortuitously enough was the same deadline they’d given for her internal injuries to either start healing or get grossly infected. So here she was. After almost four weeks in the hospital, they gave her a box of bandages, some bottles of pills, a pat on the head and they sent her home.

She had to call IBI for transportation. She waited in front of Sacred Heart’s modestly inspiring and not at all racist statue of an Indian brave kneeling in prayer before a vision of the Virgin Mary, resigned to the surety that it would be Piotr Lantz who came to pick her up, but no. It was just some guy in a white car with IBI painted on the side and, after asking how she felt and assuring her that “we’ve all been pulling for you,” he let her alone.

She couldn’t go straight home. Having lost her security card on the night of her attack, she had to go immediately to the office and register for a new one. What had been at most a twenty-minute process the day of her orientation became, in her pain-hazed mind, hours of friendly hell.

Everyone she knew (and a lot of people she didn’t) found an excuse to ‘just happen by’ while she sat in agony in the tiny room outside Human Resources waiting for them to find the guy who took pictures. They told her welcome back, which was nice of them. They told her she looked great, which was a bald-faced lie. Several people dropped hints that there would be a surprise party the following morning when she arrived for work. She appreciated the warning. Finally, the picture guy showed up and made her a new security card so she could go.

She went home to the house that IBI had given her. There was a mess in the kitchen. She cleaned it up, washed out her fridge, shut the door. She found her briefcase where it had been kicked in the struggle and put it on the table, took her paz out and put it in the charging port. Its screen lit up right away, informing her that she had one hundred thirty-seven messages waiting, but they could wait a little longer. She got a garbage bag from under the sink and put Fagin in it. After so many days, the bugs and birds hadn’t left much. Just his collar, some fur, bones. She buried him in the corner of her yard with his favorite red rubber ball and cried.

The following morning, she went to work, just like it was all over, like every step wasn’t killing her, like it wasn’t agony just to breathe. She called a driver to take her to the office where she was dutifully surprised and genuinely touched by the small party they threw to celebrate the fact that she’d survived Piotr Lantz’s attempt to murder her. There was a banner and balloons and cake and everything. Van Meyer stopped by in person to offer his grandfatherly concern for her good health and a swift recovery. She let him pet her hair and kissed his leathery cheek when he bent down in his stiff, courtly manner to offer it, and she smiled at Piotr when he offered her a slice of cake even though he dragged his finger through the frosting first, and when she threw up in the ladies room a few minutes later, she was pretty sure it was just the pain.

After her party, over the shocked clucking of her coworkers, Sarah packed her briefcase and headed for Cottonwood. They told her she was being silly to push herself so hard so soon and they were probably right. She said she was fine and to prove it, she walked—sitting by herself on the monorail while people stared and whispered, then heaving her way up the stairs to the checkpoint, and finally enduring in strained good humor the feigned horror of the jackass guard.

Through the checkpoint and down the road, Sarah walked with one hand pressed over her belly in a vain effort to keep the shock of her footsteps from jiggling anything tender. The alien hew and cry went out, warning everyone the enemy was here, but she didn’t bother looking for them as they ran along the rooftops and alleyways. She looked at nothing but her shoes, eating up one step at a time so she couldn’t see the whole length of the causeway stretching out like ten thousand miles of rust-colored torture. She thought only of the green vinyl chair at the end of the road and how good it would feel just to sit. She thought—

A hard hand closed around her arm. She was roughly turned until she found herself staring up into Samaritan’s face. He did not stare back at her. That is, his eyes were squinted and crawling over her body, but they did not bother to meet her own eyes. His palps ground and snapped in ugly little spurts on each wet exhale.

“I can’t take this from you today,” Sarah said dully. “Please just leave me alone, just once.”

He straightened up, his hand dropping to her wrist and clamping tight as shackles. “My place,” he said curtly and spat black chaw into the street. “Right now.”

“I said please!” Hopeless tears stung at her eyes and she knuckled them away, digging in her heels to keep from being dragged along behind him. “What do you want from me, damn it? What do you want?”

“I want you to pick up your feet and walk, caseworker, or I’ll carry you. Either way, you’re mine and you’re coming with me.”

He was serious.

Yanking at him wasn’t working. Sarah fumbled out her paz, but before she could even threaten to call security, he took it away from her and stuffed it into his own skirt. She opened her mouth to scream. He grabbed her.

Not around the waist, which would have been unimaginable agony, but by the only place worse: He grabbed her by the crotch, lifting her entirely off the ground and against his thorny side with her shoulder pressed in the crook of his arm and his free hand over her mouth, carrying her like a light-weight but especially awkward piece of luggage swiftly down the road to his trailer. She shrieked into his palm, kicking and beating at him with her case; he completely ignored her, marching her up onto his porch and inside, kicking the door shut behind him. Sweeping the table clean with one dexterous foot, he put her on it with a jarring thud.

“Lie down,” he said, reaching out to snap on the lights. “This is going to hurt. Relax, do what I say and it’ll be over faster.”

Cupping her aching stomach in both hands, Sarah brought up both legs and kicked him as hard as she could. He staggered, but didn’t fall and he was right back on her in the next second, pushing her flat before she could even sit up all the way. He ignored her struggles and her pleas, caught her thighs, and pulled her right to the edge of the table, then grabbed her collar and ripped her blouse open.

Buttons popped and merrily rolled, and there she sat, naked to the waist. She hadn’t even worn a bra today. It hurt too much on her ribs. She yanked her arms up to cover herself and screamed.

“Jesus Christ,” Samaritan said, staring at her. He put three clicks in ‘Christ’. Slowly, his antennae laid down flat along the top of his head. He began to breathe very hard. “All right, woman. All right. No more fucking around. Lie down.”

She tried to dive off the table. He snatched her back and struggled with her, muffling her cries under one hand while fishing through the trailer’s shelves and cupboards with the other. Spitting and swearing, he knocked an old G.I. Joe lunchbox open and pulled out something long, shiny and smooth. “Relax!” he bellowed, forcing her inexorably down as he loomed over her. He raised the shiny cylinder in his hand and thumbed a button. It began to hum.

The door exploded inward, two slats of plastiwood on either side of Sanford’s foot. He came in, shrilling furiously and then pulled up fast and said, “Jesus Christ!” He also put three clicks in ‘Christ,’ but he wasn’t staring at her. He was staring at the device in Samaritan’s hand.

“I’ve been saving it,” Samaritan said brusquely. “If not for this, then what the fuck for?” And he yanked back the hanging flap of Sarah’s blouse, exposing her.

Now Sanford looked at her, at the huge purple-and-green bruise that mottled her entire belly and chest, the swollen scars over her stomach now bleeding around her stitches, the ruined symmetry of her ribs. All the fight went out of him at once. He raised his hands; they hovered there. For a second, she thought he was going to wring them, just like T’aki.

“And you owe me a new door, asshole,” Samaritan added, glaring at him. “Get over here and hold her down.”

Sanford came to the table, his eyes moving over and around her until they finally came up to pierce hers. His hands slipped around her shoulders. She clutched his wrists, shaking her head in pleading disbelief, but let him lower her flat on Samaritan’s table.

“See how easy that is when you’re not fighting? Now hold still.” Samaritan unfastened her loose cotton pants and pulled them down perhaps three inches. He intercepted the swift, upwards jerk of her legs with the hard bar of his arm, moved them firmly back down and peeled her panties away just enough to expose the rest of the damage. “Okay,” he said, after a moment. He said it very quietly. “Who did it?”

“Piotr Lantz,” she said. “The guy I had my little talk with at the block party. The one who punched the ice.” She sucked a breath as Samaritan carefully and ruthlessly peeled back the medical tape and removed her bandages, completely missing Sanford’s low, furious hiss. “He was waiting for me after work.”

“What did he use?”

“His boot. Just his boot.”

“It was enough, wasn’t it?” Samaritan ground his palps together, snapped them once, then moved up to feel along the cracked lie of her ribs. “Tell me something. These doctors who took care of you, did they do anything but put stickers and thread on you? At least tell me they chant and wave their hands at the sun, because superstitious stupidity I handle a whole lot better than sheer incompetence. What is this hole they cut in you?”

“It’s where they fixed my liver. Please don’t touch it, it hurts so much!”

“Oh yeah?” He went right back to her stomach, his fingers like a light breeze of pure death on her swollen skin. “I thought you said they fixed it. What’d they do?”

“He…he stomped on me until…please, stop!…until my liver split and they…ungh, God, stop!…they had to cut the broken piece off—oh Sanford, make him stop!”

“Make me stop, Sanford,” Samaritan said mildly, still probing.

Sanford bent over her, filling her world with just his face, his eyes. “Hush, Sarah. Lie still. Let him work.”

“So your liver split and their answer was to cut more of it off. That’s not fixing, woman, that’s vivisection! I can’t believe we let you people push us around!” He took a few breaths, then stroked gently around the sides of her belly, and finally came to where she could see him. He glared down at her, rubbing at his own throat, and finally said, “I’m going to give you something to fix you up. Problem is, I’ve got to put it in your belly and in your bones where they’re broken. It’s going to hurt a lot. I think we’re close enough to the gate that if you scream too much, someone might actually hear you, so hold still and keep quiet.” He looked at Sanford. “Hold her still and keep her quiet.”

Sanford clicked, still looking into her eyes.

Samaritan made an adjustment to his humming cylinder. The top shifted, became a long, thin probe or a needle. He put his hand on her side, pressing on her ribs to crack them a little further apart. That pain was bad. The pain of metal scraping into her bones as he inserted the tip of his device was worse. The pain as he dumped whatever was in the cylinder into her body was pure Hell.

Sarah slapped both hands over her mouth and screamed. She wanted to think of it as burning inside, because burning had always been the worst pain she could ever imagine, but it wasn’t. It was beetles chewing her open and lemon juice soaking into the wound. It was salt-encrusted picks stabbing into her, twisting, prying her insides out into open air. It was a welder’s torch drilling the blue tip of its flame into her, exposing and cauterizing in a never-ending crater that she could feel opening up inside her. There was no lying still for it, there was no being quiet. She shrieked into her palms and kicked in mad oblivion, bucking and thrashing as tears poured unnoticed from her eyes, unable to believe there could be so much pain in the whole world, right up until Samaritan leaned onto her kicking legs and shot the rest of the cylinder into her belly.

Sarah threw herself violently forward, would have perhaps jackknifed straight up on the table, but Sanford’s hands stayed on her shoulders. He eased her down again as she struggled, pressed the cool plates of his head to her brow and chirred. She heard that, couldn’t believe she could hear it, couldn’t believe she could hear anything through this almighty infernal pain.

“I hate to do this without gqu’nu,” she heard Samaritan say and thought she felt his hands on her thighs, pinning her down, maybe even petting her. “But even if I had some, who the hell knows what it would do to her?”

“You can’t give her anything?”

“I’ve got some heroin in the back.” Samaritan snorted. “No, I can’t. She’ll just have to wait it out.”

Wait it out. Sarah groped up through the haze of her personal nightmare and found Sanford’s shoulders to clutch. He chirred at her, stroking her while the knives of her ribs twisted in deeper and deeper until suddenly they weren’t there anymore. It wasn’t gradual at all, but it wasn’t relief either, because as soon as that pain was gone, every nerve was ready to focus on her guts. She began to thrash again and both yang’ti leaned on her heavily, pinning her to the creaking table, while her stomach—for the past week swollen with a pain so great, she’d forgotten what it felt like not to hurt—became so wracked by it, she thought it would split…hoped it would, even, anything if only it would stop!

Sanford, chirring. His hand, the prickly underside like the legs of centipedes, rubbing back and forth slowly between her breasts. The cool, curved plates of his head pressing on her skin. His breath, like a wet bellows in her ear. His palps, vibrating and nudging softly at her neck. Sanford.

The acid in her guts became a slow, sour ache and then, as suddenly as with her ribs, just the ghost of one. She sagged into gravity’s pull, sweaty and exhausted, feeling only a dim, painless tugging as Samaritan cut her sutures out, but she was too tired to feel anything else.

“Thank you,” Sanford said quietly, stroking her hair.

“Blow me.” Samaritan came to the head of the table, shoved Sanford roughly aside and bent over her, clicking as he examined her. “I think I got the worst of it,” he said at last, prodding her. He hesitated, made a fist and pressed down hard directly over her liver.

“Ow,” Sarah muttered, but it was a pale thing, no worse than a day-old bruise.

“Stop squalling, you big baby.” He pulled her up, yanked her blouse shut and tied it over her midriff in a few curt pulls. He started to say something, then stopped and peered closely at her face. “Oh piss on me,” he snapped.

“What’s wrong?” she asked dully.

Without answering, he touched her cheekbone, the one Piotr had kicked and cracked the day he’d come to burn Baccus’s house and then kicked again the day he’d come to kill her in her kitchen. It didn’t hurt. Samaritan’s palps ground. “Went all through your bones, I guess. Fuck. Sarah, look at me.”

He’d never used her name before. She obeyed, too tired anymore to even think.

He punched her.

Not hard, not really. Her head rocked back, but didn’t fly off, and stars burst behind her eyes, but didn’t fade to black. Certainly, he didn’t crack her cheekbone again. She clapped her hand to her face, eyes swimming with reflexive tears, and saw Sanford lunge across the table’s foot in an angry blur.

“Stop and think,” Samaritan said crossly. “How’s it going to look when she goes out fewer colors than when she came in? Fresh bruises will hide the fact that the old ones are gone, so lay off me. I smell the piss already. You can stop spraying.”

“Zhu’kwe!” Sanford spat, a word her translator would not attempt. He lifted her down from the table and steadied her as she looked at the smooth and only slightly smudged flesh of her stomach. “For two chits, I’d—”

Samaritan held up the empty cylinder.

Sanford was quiet. Tense and fuming, but quiet.

“Go on, then.” Samaritan tossed the device and Sanford caught it. “I don’t know what you’re doing with this shit, but I get the feeling it’s better off with you than me. Get out and don’t forget my new door. Oh, and caseworker…?”

She looked back, her hand still held in Sanford’s even though she had her balance back now.

Samaritan handed over her paz and closed one eye in a wink. “Nice tits.”

“You prick,” she said shakily, snatching up her case from his floor.

“And anytime you want to see it, just come on by.” He waggled his fingers, found an unopened beer on his shelf and dropped heavily into a chair in his shabby trailer to drink it, laughing at her retreat.

To be able to walk without the burning in her lungs or the leaden ache in her gut, heavenly. It had seemed to take hours to come halfway up this road; the last length to Sanford’s house blew by in seconds. And once inside, in the stuffy shade she’d so been craving, she let the door close and impulsively threw her arms around his hard, inhospitable body, hugging him just like he was T’aki.

She startled him, plainly. It occurred to her only then that she’d never seen adult yang’ti hugging, only a parent with a child and then only rarely. Flustered, she let go, but his arms came up to trap her in a thorny, belated answering embrace. He stared at her, antennae twitching tensely, his body perfectly still, silent.

“Sarah!” T’aki came bouncing from the back room around their legs, his toy ship in one hand and the other clutching and tugging at her clothes. “You came! You came! You’re better!” And threw himself against her knee just as exuberantly as she’d thrown herself on Sanford.

“Thanks for coming to see me in the hospital, jellybean,” she said, reaching to pat his hard little head. She looked at Sanford, who was still holding her. “You have no idea what that meant to me. I know it couldn’t have been easy to arrange.”

He chirred, a soft thread of sound passing through his ragged breath. That was all.

“Thank you,” she said.

His hands flexed just slightly on her back.

She could feel her lips beginning to twitch into a smile. “You can let go now.”

He did, but slowly.

“I’m sorry about Fagin,” T’aki said, still wrapped around her knee.

“Oh honey, so am I.” She bent and picked him up, letting his palps tickle at her shoulder as she rocked him. “It was a bad thing…but it’s over now.”

“Is it.” Sanford moved the chair and opened the hidden hatch. He dropped down into his secret room and came up again with his special device. He set it on the table next to the empty cylinder Samaritan had given him and switched on his work light. “What will you do now?”

“Keep out of trouble and pretend to be hurt.” She touched her belly, smiling, then her cheek, and winced.

T’aki touched her cheek too, chirring, then hugged her neck uncomfortably tight.

“You would be safer to leave us for a time,” Sanford said, his back to her, already setting out his tools.

“Maybe.” She sat down, found T’aki’s side-seams and lightly rubbed the soft skin there. “But maybe not. I have to at least pretend it doesn’t bother me to work here, don’t I? And I’ll risk it. I like seeing you. It’s all there is to like in this place.”

“With luck and this—” Sanford rested his hand briefly on his code-bank. “—you will not have to suffer this place much longer. Either of us.” He picked up a long, thin tool like a dentist’s pick and slipped it into a groove on the side of the cylinder, then paused and glanced at Sarah. “Take T’aki to the Heaps, please. I need to work without distraction.”

T’aki, affronted, blew through his palps but then immediately began pulling Sarah toward the door, excitedly chanting, “Heaps! Heaps! Heaps!”

“Just for a few hours,” Sanford said. “Do you mind?”

“Of course not.” Sarah straightened her mangled blouse as much as possible and picked up her briefcase, taking T’aki by the hand. “It’s my job. At least until you get that thing fixed and we can get the hell out of here.”

“Hell is a vulgar word,” T’aki chirped, his legs tucked up so he could swing at the end of her arm.

“You’re right and I’m very sorry. Let’s go, jellybean.”

He raced out the door ahead of her and Sarah followed, moving slowly and trying to remember exactly how the pain had bent her back when she’d felt it—minutes, just minutes ago—but when she reached back to close the door, Sanford’s hand slipped into hers. She raised her eyes and he was there, looking back at her. Several times, he seemed about to speak, but the little clicks and scraping sounds he made came to nothing.

“I missed you too,” said Sarah.

He thought about that, then released her hand and let her close the door. T’aki was waiting about a hundred feet away, jumping through the obstacle course of some client’s tire- and appliance-strewn yard. Sarah headed that way, touching her hand briefly to the cracked glass of Sanford’s window. He tapped it in return and off she went to the Heaps, humming under her breath and thinking how funny it was, that bad days could turn into good ones so fast.

* * *

Or how quickly it could all go bad again. That was a whole lot less funny, however. As Sarah waited out her third hour at the impound lot in the hopes of someday getting her van back, she had plenty of time to think about what was funny and what wasn’t. Just the fact that she was here at all, for instance. Not on Earth or in life or anything existential, but here in this pea-soup-colored waiting room, on this plastic chair, staring hopelessly at the now-serving number on the wall above the surly gentleman at the service desk. She was here because her van had been towed after she’d abandoned it at the hospital. Apparently, the hospital’s attitude was that near-death was not a good enough reason to leave your vehicle on the curb in front of the Emergency Room, which was understandable if a bit assish. What was less understandable and a lot more assish was the attitude here: making a person who had been in critical condition mere days ago wait for three hours to get her van back.

And they knew who she was. On her initial approach to the so-called service desk, the gentleman on duty had scanned her paz into their system, glanced once at the screen, and said, “So you’re the bug-lady.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re the lady got beat up by a bug.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Sarah Fowler? IBI?”

“Yes.”

He picked up a somewhat mangled section of newspaper and tossed it down on the desk in front of her. “Says here you got beat up by a bug.”

Her picture was in the paper. Sarah Fowler was front-page news in The Wheaton Morning Clarion. It wasn’t the picture from her employee’s badge or her driver’s license or even her high school yearbook. In fact, if it weren’t for the caption with her name in it, she wouldn’t have recognized herself. She was unconscious in a hospital bed, a mess of tubes and wires, bruises and bandages. IBI social worker released after brutal bug attack, said the tagline.

“Those sons of bitches,” Sarah heard herself say in a remarkably mild, marveling tone.

The service guy gave her language a disapproving grunt and took his paper back. Then he handed her a scrip with a misleadingly small number printed on it and told her to sit down and wait. Sarah went, but she was already typing her name into her paz’s search engine and by the time she dropped, disbelieving, into this hard, uncomfortable chair, she was reading.

Three hours. Dozens of articles, not just from Kansas papers, but from all over the whole damn world, although it was the Clarion she kept coming back to. It should have been obvious that something about the incident had been in the news, especially after Kate’s call, but this? The doctors, the cops, and of course IBI themselves—all agreed no human could have created her injuries, which were recounted in gruesome detail over and over. The Clarion went on to warn that the bug or bugs responsible should be considered to be at large somewhere in the surrounding community. Anyone who saw a bug should under no circumstances approach it, but should call IBI or the police immediately, and until the situation was resolved, parents were strongly urged to keep pets and small children under close watch.

This admonition reassured the locals exactly as much as it was intended to and the editorial forums were dominated from that point on by the good citizens of Wheaton demanding action that ranged from public protests to orchestrated harassment of IBI employees to the extermination of every last bug and every last bug-lover.

When they finally called her number, Sarah almost didn’t hear it. It took the service desk guy shouting, “Hey, bug-lady!” to get her attention (to get everyone’s attention, really). She paid her fine, collected her van, and drove home with her thoughts swooping through such violent circles that they gave her a headache.

The last thing she wanted to do in that state of mind was talk to someone, but less than a minute after swiping her passcard through Cottonwood’s front gate, Sarah’s paz chirped. The number was unfamiliar, but identified itself as IBI Admin, so she really couldn’t just ignore it.

“I’m driving,” was her hello. “Is this important?”

The picture cleared enough to show her floor supervisor, Beech or Birch, she still didn’t know. He was grinning. Not just smiling—and he’d done little enough of that in the few months she’d known him—but grinning. “We’d like you to come in, Miss Fowler.”

“To the office?” Sarah asked stupidly.

His grin widened. “Yes.”

“Tonight?”

“Right now.”

“Mr…” Sheesh, who was this man? “I’ve just spent three hours at the impound lot and I’m in a lot of pain. I just don’t think I can drive anymore tonight.”

Mr. Tree-of-some-sort immediately sobered up. “Of course not, Miss Fowler, so sorry. Just go on home.”

Her relief at this easy escape lasted only until she got home and found a white IBI van waiting in her driveway and a man in a flak vest leaning up against it. He laughed when she asked him if she was being arrested, but he also made it clear that she was coming with him. She could grab an aspirin first if she wanted one, but he had his orders and he was taking her in.

Sarah got in the van and sat quietly as he drove through Cottonwood’s pleasant residential neighborhood and right past the Social Services building where she worked.

“Do you know what this is about?” Sarah asked. Her voice did not shake, but her hands hurt a little from the effort of not clutching each other too tightly.

“Nope. Just that the big dog wants you.”

“Mr. Birch? Or Beech? The guy that sounds like Elmer Fudd?”

The driver shot her a puzzled glance as he navigated his way across a largely empty parking lot to the administrations building. “I’m talking about van Meyer, lady. I don’t know who you’re talking about. What the hell kind of name is Elmer Fudd?”

Van Meyer. She tried to dredge up some surprise and couldn’t. If anyone was going to bring her in after working hours on her first day back, it would have to be van Meyer.

But it was her floor supervisor waiting by the door when the driver let her out. He was still grinning. The effect was even creepier when not framed by her paz’s chipped screen.

“No offense, sir,” said Sarah, as he escorted her onto an elevator, “but there better not be a surprise party when we get out of this thing.”

“Even better,” he promised.

He took her to the basement, one level lower than the monorail station. It took way too long, the way elevators in hospitals and courthouses always seem to do. She entertained herself by imagining the doors opening on van Meyer, maybe in a grungy concrete hallway with a naked lightbulb burning behind him, and that would be the last anyone heard of her. Ridiculous. Van Meyer was evil, all right, but he was the sort of evil who wore a suit, not the kind that dragged young women off to be tortured in secret, underground dungeons.

But when the doors did open, they opened on Piotr Lantz, the kind of evil that stomped on people until their ribs broke and their livers ruptured.

Piotr greeted her with a grunt and a distracted crawl of his eyes over her body. When he got to her face, he paused, then thinly smiled. “Penny for your thoughts, Pollyanna.”

“I was wondering if you ever wore a suit.”

Piotr looked down at himself—khaki combat fatigues and flak vest, fashionably accented with rifle, handgun, bowie knife and boots—and then up at her again. “I don’t remember asking you to the prom.”

“I was just wondering. Do you?”

He shrugged, escorting her out into the hall (which was well-lit and nicely painted, even if it was concrete). “Been known to happen. Funerals, mostly.”

She put out her hand, walking.

“What’s that about?” he asked warily.

“My penny.”

His laughter was a doggish bark, but he dug into his pocket and found her one. “I like you,” he said, this man who had nearly killed her and left her dog hanging by his collar on her back fence. “You believe that?”

“Yes.” She did.

“Tell you what, princess. Friday night, me and you. They gotta have someplace fancy in this cow-fucking town,” he said, glancing back at Beech-or-Birch, trailing along behind them. “Got any recommendations?”

Her supervisor’s smile was gone, but other than his tight jaw and brick-red ears, he showed no sign that he’d heard the insult. “There’s a dinner club in Wheaton with a decent prime rib, but I believe you have to be a member.”

Piotr did not appear to consider achieving membership in the next four days as any real obstacle. He merely grunted and turned his appraising eyes back on Sarah’s shirt-front. “Seven o’clock,” he told her boobs. “Wear something tight. I gotta dress up, so do you.”

“Do you have a favorite color?” Sarah asked evenly. “As long as I’m buying a dress.”

His grin sharpened into a leer that suggested she wouldn’t be in it long enough to matter. “I’m easy to please, princess.”

She forced a smile back at him. “Seven o’clock it is.”

He moved on ahead of her to swipe his passcard through a reader and open a door. He held it for her. A true gentleman. Sarah found herself thinking fleetingly of her sister and Kate’s unspoken habit of ensuring employment by sleeping with her boss. Sarah had never acknowledged that she knew about the affairs, but they’d both heard their mom’s “respect yourself and your body” speech and it was hard not to judge. And now here she was, accepting without question the prospect of going to bed with this thug—date was nothing but a crude euphemism in Piotr’s mouth, not that he’d actually used the word date—so that her job could not be threatened. As soon as Sanford had his little machine fixed, he’d need her to help him get out. She could put up with anything until then. Anything.

She smiled at him as she walked through the door under Piotr’s arm, thinking how much she hoped they served drinks at this dinner club. The sex was going to be hurtful and unpleasant and she had absolutely no intention of being sober when it happened.

Van Meyer was waiting in the hallway on the other side. A short hallway, wide, with black lines painted on the floor, running parallel to the walls, bisecting the small space into something even smaller. It felt claustrophobic and institutional, miles away from the manicured lawns and happy families of IBI’s residential neighborhood somewhere above them.

It occurred to her in a distant way that no one knew she was here, not really. No one but the driver who had dropped her off and then driven himself away. He’d had his orders, he’d followed them, and what happened after that was really none of his concern.

She looked back, hoping to catch some glimpse of her floor supervisor’s face—still a witness, even if she didn’t know his name—but saw only Piotr in front of a closed, locked door with his arms folded across his chest. Not smiling. Not really paying attention. Idly perusing the ass he’d be tapping Friday night, maybe, but only as a means of passing the time until he was needed again.

Sarah looked back at van Meyer, who simply extended his hand and waited for her. She took a bracing breath of stale, subterranean air, put her faith in her big, honest eyes, and took it.

His hand engulfed hers, leathery and much stronger than it appeared. Not a businessman’s grip. He’d had a manicure recently, square-cut and professional. His thumbnail was warped down at the cuticle; he’d been burnt or scarred or something once, but long ago, and now all that was left was a wrinkle in his manicure.

His other hand came up and closed over the first, trapping her little hand between them. “How do you feel?”

“I’m fine,” she said mechanically and could have kicked herself. She was not supposed to be fine. She was supposed to be broken. “I’m tired, mostly. More than I thought I would be.”

“I will not keep you long. I must say,” he went on, still holding her hand, holding her. “I was surprised to see you so soon. It was expected that you should take time off. Your health is not to be risked.”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do with myself at home.”

“This I understand very well.” He nodded to prove it, but his eyes showed no sympathy. They just kept prying around the edges of the honesty in hers. “Still, I have concern. IBI is not the family I would like it to be, but you, Miss Fowler, you have become very personal to me.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He stared her down, smiling, stroking her hand, and when her eyes at last dropped, the teeth on that trap tightened. “Piotr tells me you had a visitor during your stay in hospital.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bug.”

“One of my clients. Mr. Sanford. Mostly his child.” There was no point trying to hide their identities, but she hoped to lessen the significance of this information with a tentative smile and half a confession: “I like working with the children. I know it isn’t professional of me, but they’re just so small and cute.”

Van Meyer laughed and nodded. “A devious trait to be found always in nature, nee? Bear cub is soft and fuzzy, crocodile crawling out of egg peeps like chick, and who deny big eyes and ugly-sweet face of young chimpanzee? Ah, but all these animals remain wild. When they grow up, the human who raise them is often only animal, only meat. The creatures we love do not always love us back.”

Sarah bit at her lip, wondering how far to take this, how much risk was too much, or not enough. “But these aren’t creatures, Mr. van Meyer. They’re aliens…they’re bugs…but they’re still people.”

“Ja. And so you form attachment and so perhaps it is true they form attachment to you. Did you go to see your small bug today?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was he glad to see you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And his father?”

Sarah kept her eyes on him with great effort, trusting to her honest face to hide her twisting stomach, her racing heart. “He let me in.”

“This is not the same thing as affection.” Van Meyer nodded, stroking her hand again. “I am pleased to see you understand that.” His expression grew even more serious and he leaned close, uncomfortably intimate in this small space. “I say that you are personal to me, ja? I take personal pride in the good work that you do here. And I take personal offense at the harm that befall you.”

He straightened, released her hand, and opened the door behind him. He gestured. Ladies first; another gentleman. Sarah saw no alternative but to enter. She recognized the room without ever being in it before. She’d seen it a thousand times, in a thousand different bad movies. Sometimes it was in a torchlit cave and sometimes on a spaceship, but the overall function was the same: an interrogation chamber with sinister figures in the foreground and helpless captive behind bars. She may have gasped. She knew she stared. And when van Meyer offered a chair in his concerned grandfatherly way, she sat without really being conscious of his presence.

Baccus. The plates over her chest were cracked and shiny with leaking blood. The side of her face had swollen, pushing one eye shut. She stood with her arms raised and her head down, breathing hard and drooling blood and chaw in a slow trickle down her own chest.

“You are quite safe,” van Meyer was telling her. “It cannot escape, cannot reach you. Piotr, water for Miss Fowler.”

“I’m okay,” Sarah said somewhere in the world and all the fine gentlemen in the room consoled her until Piotr came back with a bottle of water. The thought of drinking it in front of Baccus was obscene; she held onto it with both hands instead, grateful for something, anything, to hold.

“Turn,” van Meyer said, and as Baccus faced the wall, he rested his hand gently on Sarah’s shoulder. “You will wish to enter his number, my dear. You may not realize, but you know this bug.”

“It’s one of my clients,” she managed. She did not bother with her paz. “It’s Mr. Baccus. What is he doing here?”

“A fair question, but I think better question would be where did we find him, hmm? On what side of containment wall?”

Sarah looked up at him, baffled. “He was out? What…How?”

“Another fair question, and another better one: Why?” Van Meyer patted her shoulder and gestured past all these smiling people at the silent, drooling alien in her cage. “Miss Fowler, we have found the bug who do you such grievous injury.”

The words circled several times before their meaning finally found her.

“No,” said Sarah and shook her head for good measure. “No, that’s not…It wasn’t…It was just some guys!”

“Oh?” Deeply concerned, van Meyer retreated to consult his own paz, a Juno model, with a floating holograph screen that made it impossible not to recognize Sarah’s own police report. “Then you do see your attacker?”

“No, but—”

“You hear him, then.”

“Not a word. Not a sound!” Sarah added, pointing at Baccus, whose wet breaths hitched in a flinch. “I would have heard that. I would have heard clicking or…or something! I would have known!”

“Even the bug can be quiet when stalking. But we do not require that you identify, Miss Fowler,” van Meyer said, tucking his paz away in his jacket. “We have indisputable proof already. We have the bug himself and we have his confession.”

“What…?” Sarah looked at Baccus. She would not meet her eyes.

“Speak,” van Meyer said. He did not raise his voice. He didn’t have to.

“I did it,” Baccus said, as if he’d pulled a hidden string in her back. She choked on the words a little, spat blood on herself and said, louder, “I hurt the caseworker.”

Sarah’s head began to shake back and forth again. She couldn’t seem to stop.

“Tell us why,” van Meyer prompted.

“She brought food. I thought she would have more food where she lived. I went to her house but I did not find food. When she came home, I hurt her.” Baccus raised her eyes haltingly to van Meyer and dropped them again. “I kicked her. It was me. I ran.”

“No. It…no. How did…How did he know where I lived?” Sarah demanded. Not she. If they found out Baccus was female, it wouldn’t be from Sarah, no matter what they said or did. She would go on a hundred dates with Piotr Lantz stone-cold sober before she let that slip. “How could he possibly know where I lived?”

“This we do not know,” van Meyer admitted as Baccus just stood there. “After so many years, there is still so much we do not know. Perhaps he track you by scent or perhaps he simply follow you home. Perhaps—”

“Fagin!” Sarah blurted. “They shot Fagin, sir! They hung my dog up on the fence and they shot him!”

Van Meyer glanced at Piotr. Piotr shrugged and said, “The dog was a mess. You told the cops you were robbed, naturally we’re gonna think it got shot up. If we knew it was a bug the whole time, we’d have known the dog really got chewed on.”

“I did it,” Baccus began. “I ate the dog.”

“See?”

“There were shell casings everywhere!” Sarah said, her voice rising. “I had to clean them up! He got shot!”

Some of the other people in the room shifted. Someone whispered to someone else. Baccus breathed and bled. Van Meyer and Piotr just looked at each other.

At last, van Meyer turned and looked at the alien in the cage. He said, calmly, “Where do you get the gun?”

Baccus looked at Sarah. Sarah shook her head. Baccus looked back at van Meyer and said, “I found it in the Heaps?”

“No,” said Sarah. “Oh no. No.”

“Go on.”

“IBI killed my eggs. I killed the caseworker’s dog. I did it.” Baccus looked at Sarah again. She lowered her arms slowly to her sides. “I knew they would catch me,” she said. “So I did what I could.” She wiped at her mouth, studied the blood this left on her hand, and said, haltingly, “I’m not sorry.”

At some signal unseen by Sarah, the other men in the room stepped up to the bars of the cage (which were, Sarah noted with surreal clarity, clearly wide enough for a person to slip through. They had been built only to hold aliens, built to hold bugs) and put Baccus in restraints. They weren’t mean about it, which actually made it seem worse. They gave orders without shouting, refrained from epithets, never even touched their weapons, much less brandished them. Baccus made it easy for them; her head was ducked, her antennae low and her delicate claspers tucked up tight. She followed them from the cell without coaching, walked between them into the hall, and was lost behind the quietly closing door.

‘I will never see her again,’ thought Sarah. It sounded, even in the privacy of her own head, unforgivably theatrical and even a little silly. This wasn’t one of her stupid movies. This was America. This was the twenty-first century and these were visitors. This was the real world so this wasn’t really happening.

“Where are you taking him?” Sarah asked, knowing he would lie.

“To speak with legal advocate and then to counseling center. A very pretty name for prison, nee? But there is no more we can do.” Van Meyer rolled his shoulders in an elegant sort of shrug. “The bug has violent nature which defy all rehabilitation.”

“I don’t believe he did it. I haven’t heard any proof.”

“Loyalty to client can be admirable, Miss Fowler, but please do not be foolish.” Van Meyer studied her as she sat numbly gripping her water bottle and finally sighed. “I had hoped it would comfort you to know that your attacker had been caught, that he would never hurt you again. I would seem to have made error.”

She could only stare at him. She didn’t know what to say. Her eyes could not possibly be honest enough to keep protesting. She…She was going to sit here and let them take Baccus away and she wasn’t going to argue.

She wasn’t sure when she started crying. It was subtle. The tears themselves didn’t come until van Meyer offered his handkerchief with grandfatherly concern. She cried messy, like a child, a stupid child.

“See how I have upset you,” van Meyer murmured. He was patting her back. It was all she could do to keep from shuddering away. “Someone will take you home now, Miss Fowler. You will have the week off now, ja?”

“No!” she wept.

“Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow, to rest.”

“I’m okay!” And she was. She was fine. Baccus was gone.

How was she going to tell Sanford? How could she look him in the eye and admit that she was right there when they took Baccus away and she did nothing to stop it?

And as bad as that thought was, the one that followed was infinitely worse: What if it had been Sanford in the cage? She knew they hadn’t found Baccus running around in her backyard. Most likely, they’d stumbled on her during a random scan and decided being a rogue egg-farmer made her seditious enough to serve as a villain for this scene, but if they hadn’t, if they’d just gone in and grabbed someone from her case-files, it could have been Sanford. He certainly would have been the most ironic choice—why not make the bug who’d visited her in the hospital responsible for putting her there? She could imagine it all too easily: one white security van to take Sanford, one black population enforcement van to take T’aki. Then they’d ransack the house, not searching as much as just trashing it, before they burned it down. The code-bank would be lost—confiscated, destroyed, or just buried in the wreckage—along with the last man who knew how to work it.

It could still happen. It would be easy enough for van Meyer to decree that the attack had been part of a greater conspiracy. She might see Sanford in this room yet.

Sarah cleaned her face one last time and gave van Meyer his handkerchief back. “I won’t forget this, sir,” she said. “I know you think I’m pretty silly, but I do learn from my mistakes.”

He did not correct her presumption. Instead, without taking his eyes from hers or softening them with even the lie of a smile, he said, “To what mistake do you refer?”

Sarah looked at the empty cage, at Baccus’s blood staining the floor, and said what she had to say. “I can’t be their friend. They don’t love me back.”

He patted her head, much as he would a dog who had clumsily performed its first trick, and said, “I have arranged a press conference in the afternoon, to ease public fear now that violent bug is once more contained. They will surely wish some statement from the one most affected by this unpleasant business.”

“You want me to talk to them? At a press conference?” She did not have to feign her dismay. “I’ve never done anything like that before. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

Van Meyer waved that off. “Something will be prepared for you. You read this, they take pictures and IBI publicist take all questions. Your part is really quite small, Miss Fowler, but I am afraid no one else will do.”

“They want to see a victim,” Sarah said bitterly, thinking she could show them a victim all right, she could show them thousands of victims right on the other side of that clean, white wall.

“Perhaps. But you will not give them one.” Van Meyer squeezed her shoulder with a warm smile that never touched his eyes. “You will stand before them in your scars and you will be IBI in all this enterprise’s strength and compassion. This is why it must be Miss Fowler, ja? Because you are…?”

‘Gullible,’ thought Sarah. Aloud, she guessed, “Nice?”

He tsked, disappointed. “Sincere. Why did you come to work today?”

She blinked. “I…wanted to work.”

“Why?”

“I like my job. This is the most important work I’ll ever do.”

“So you say once before. You still believe?”

Her job at IBI was and would always be a poisonous stain over her heart, but she didn’t work for them. She worked for her clients. “More than ever,” she said.

At the door, Piotr snorted and shook his head.

Van Meyer studied her, unsmiling. “I hope you never lose your conviction, my dear. As I hope you forgive the old man who profit from it.” He took his hand from her at last and waved her toward the door. “I will send a driver at two, if that is convenient?”

“I’ll be ready.”

“Of course you will. You have given your word. And you will find I reward loyalty. Is it not so, Piotr?”

Piotr did not immediately answer. His nod, when it finally came, had more weight without words. It unsettled her.

“So. Tonight, good sleep. Tomorrow, a short statement for cameras. And then it is back to work, ja?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Piotr, come. It has been a difficult day for our Miss Fowler and it is time to let her go home.”

Piotr pushed himself off the wall where he had been leaning and opened the door. They went back to the lobby—van Meyer just ahead of her, Piotr prowling behind, and Sarah between them like a condemned prisoner being marched to the gallows. There was no more talk, only a polite goodbye and a grunt from Piotr. Sarah’s driver was waiting for her. He opened her door. The world was simply filled with gentlemen tonight.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

After so many years of waiting, it seemed unfair that it should take so little time to actually assemble the code-bank. In a matter of hours, it was done and all the rest of his time was free to be filled with the other elements of escape, mundane, but no less essential. With so much still untested, so much that could still go wrong, Sanford was grateful for the familiarity of work.

Here in late autumn, the Heaps gave up few real treasures, so until the post-holiday reaping (which he dared to hope he would not be here to see), Sanford was reduced to picking over what had already been salvaged in the shops surrounding the Heaps. This provided him a predictable assortment of useless technical debris, but eventually, he ran across a human with a large number of heating units in need of some repair who was willing to part with them for a mere two hundred dollars. Sanford paid, knowing the man thought he was cheating him. Yang’ti were largely indifferent to winter cold and heaters were more of a human luxury. Doubtless, this man had been trying to peddle his wares for days with no luck. However, Sanford also knew that eggs needed to be kept warm over the winter. Once repaired, each heater would sell as quickly as he could make the offer. And since the repairs in question amounted to little more than changing the electrical cord and dusting the innards, this was easy profit.

Easy, but time-consuming. For the rest of the day and long into the night, Sanford worked on heaters. After a short sleep, he worked on them some more. When T’aki grew restless, Sanford took him to Obek’we’s school and came back to work on heaters. He was determined not to stop again until he’d finished the last of them, but when Sarah knocked on his door, he welcomed her in.

She looked off, to his eye. Not injured, not in any obvious manner, but worn down and pulled thin. He saw this, but did not remark or give it deeper thought. Something bad had happened, but something bad was always happening and he had heaters to fix.

“I don’t see T’aki,” she remarked, sitting in her usual place in the green chair. “Is he at school?”

“Yes.”

“How does he like it?”

“He doesn’t. He considers it a punishment and a great unfairness for the small reward of reading.”

Her soft brows arched. “Is he actually reading already?”

“He is. I’ve found him with several magazines.” Sanford finished one heater, set it aside, took another, and began unscrewing the outer case. “Unfortunately, they were all pornographic.”

“Oh.”

“He insists he was only reading the…” He tipped his antennae forward, clicking as he tried to think of words the translator could manage. “…the humor pages. The little drawings with jokes.”

“Oh! Well, that’s not so—”

“Those were also pornographic.” Sanford bent over the exposed coils, cleaning them with puffs of compressed air. “And he hides them, which is suggestive in itself. I suppose it is only natural that he should be curious, but I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Sounds like it might be time for the talk.”

There was a curious emphasis in her last words, a hint of embarrassed color in her cheeks, but neither was enough to tell him her meaning. “What talk?” he asked.

“You know.” Her color deepened, which only emphasized the dark smudges under her eyes. He wondered again what was wrong. “The big sex talk.”

He clicked, feeling out his immediate discomfort. “I suppose that could be part of the problem.”

“I know he’s young, but like you said, it’s everywhere in here. Better he get answers from you than from Ass Freaks Weekly.”

He clicked, acknowledging this, then shook it off and bent over the heater determinedly. “I’m not sure I’m ready to have that discussion even if he is. And yet, if he does not come to me with his questions, where will he go? Sam is altogether too willing to educate him on the subject of human sexuality.” He blew distractedly through his palps, concentrating on his work.

“Maybe he’ll forget about it once you get him away from all the dirty pictures. Have you fixed your machine yet?”

“Rebuilt, Sarah, please. Fixed implies it may have been broken all this time and I simply could not deal with that very well.”

“You don’t know?”

“Certain components have to be charged.”

“Oh God, now you have to build a charger?”

“I have one, pray Ko’vi,” he added under his breath, and tapped his brow with the curled back of his hand—a genuflection he sincerely thought he’d forgotten until he did it. He looked at his hand in some bemusement, clicked, and removed the heater’s old power cord. “I know a man, a real engineer, as opposed to this…hobby of mine. I told him I needed a charging dock and he claimed he could build one from two deconstructed incinerators.”

“Can he?”

“It seems to be working, although, having deconstructed my share of incinerators, I can say with confidence that he only used the parts from one of them.” He clicked with absent-minded disdain. “I’ve known this man eleven years across three camps and he cheated me without hesitation.”

“When will it be ready?”

“Patience,” he murmured, moving on to the matter of the wiring. It was more than just the cord on this unit; everything would have to be changed. “Patience is more than a word, as my father would often say.”

“Did he?” A reluctant smile twitched at one corner of her mouth. “How irritating was that growing up?”

“Profoundly. But no less true. Consider it this way: the more time it takes, the more time I have to plan the escape.”

“Right. The plan.” She shifted in the chair, rubbing restlessly at her arms and then her knees. “Have you got the broad strokes worked out yet?”

“Have you ever seen a movie called…” He stopped working to focus on finding the right words, then carefully said, “…Three Bricks?”

She frowned at the ceiling for some time, but ultimately shook her head. “Must not be bad enough for my taste. A prison movie, I take it?”

“More or less. I suppose it’s best that you not see it, actually. It did not end well.”

Her frown deepened.

“The plan itself was sound,” he assured her. “And easily adapted to my purposes. So. Friday next, before you leave, I’ll give you a series of explosives—”

She sat up sharply to give him a look of horror. “Oh, please be kidding!”

“—for you to place at certain locations. I’ll set them to detonate Sunday, during the morning shift change at seven. You’ll have to acquire one of their vans and enough of a uniform that no one will question you driving it. T’aki and I will be waiting at the wall between Checkpoints Eleven and Twelve. When I hear the explosions, I’ll wait three minutes and blow the wall from our side. You’ll pick us up and get us out. Have a second vehicle waiting outside Cottonwood for the remainder of the journey. It would be best if it were not your van.”

“Sanford, who do you think I am? Where am I supposed to get a car?”

“I’ll give you money with the explosives. With luck, and contraband,” he added, waving at the heaters without taking his eyes off the one lying open under his careful hands, “I hope to have at least twenty thousand dollars.”

“Holy shit, Sanford! Before Friday?”

“Next Friday. The real money will only come from the guns and I have to be careful how I sell them.”

“Next…oh.” She sighed and settled into the chair, looking over the mess of heaters with a discouraged eye. “That long.”

“Haste is not our friend. I need time to work out the last details. Besides, even if we left tomorrow, we would still have to eat tonight.” Sanford picked through a plastic tub filled with loose wires, shook it, and picked through it some more, adding dryly, “And my son will want to buy more pornography to read on the way home. It will be a long trip.”

“I’ll see if I can find some books for him in town. And some board games.”

“It isn’t necessary.”

“Yeah, but I’ve to go anyway. I’ve got a…thing.” She turned her head toward the window, not really looking through it, but just avoiding the sight of him. “I was really hoping we’d escape before then so I wouldn’t have to go through with it. Now I not only have to go, I have to price getaway cars.”

Sanford changed wires. Sarah fidgeted and would not look at him. At length, he indicated a well-used rag. “Wipe down the heaters for me, please. They sell for more if they’re clean.”

Sarah obeyed at once, but one sure sign of her distraction remained and the more she busied herself, the more obvious it became.

“My radio seems to be broken,” he said finally.

“Is that was these are?” She peered at the heater she was cleaning, then checked herself and laughed. “Oh, you mean me. Sorry. I’m just thinking.”

“If you were only thinking, you’d be humming,” he countered. “Is something wrong?”

She shook her head, cleaning the heater with renewed vigor, but eventually, she had to put it aside and when she did, she was in no hurry to start in on a new one. Instead, awkwardly, she said, “Do you get TV here?”

Odd question. What was this about?

“Yes. Some can even be repaired. But you’ve been with us to see movies,” he reminded himself. “You mean, do we receive transmissions? No. Although the humans are happy to sell programs to those with registered media players, we are not permitted ‘news’ in any format.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Denying prisoners access to current events is a fairly standard psychological control, but it’s not particularly relevant to our situation. Most of your news has nothing to do with us and what few opinions they do express are considerably more civil than what I’ve heard in the camps.”

“So you do watch TV.”

Sanford bent under his work table and brought out a digital tablet. Its screen was cracked and most of its innards had been salvaged, but it was the only one of its kind he had at the moment. “We find these sometimes with credits left on them. I used to watch them, but no more. They’re too valuable. And I already know what the humans think of us.” He tossed the tablet back under the table and picked up another length of wire. “Why do you ask?”

She sighed heavily and slumped back in the chair. “I don’t want to tell you.”

“Having said that,” he remarked, “I think you might as well. It can’t be a worse reason than what I’m sure to imagine if you don’t.”

She was quiet. After a minute or two of silence, Sanford decided she meant it and that he would not press. She had seen something, clearly, some atrocity the humans either were planning or had already inflicted upon his people. Something new to her, perhaps, but he doubted it was new to him and since he could do nothing more about it than he was already doing, he saw no point in dwelling on it.

But just when he thought she would sit and brood forever, she suddenly said, “They took Baccus.”

“Yes.” He hadn’t seen it, but he’d heard. They’d taken her at the Heaps, when she grew hungry and desperate enough to risk working there. The soldiers didn’t scan everyone, not even every tenth yang’ti who passed the checkpoint as the regulations posted there warned, but they scanned her and then they took her. She did not resist, he heard. He was not surprised. When the worst finally happens, it can seem like a relief.

“They’re saying she was the one who attacked me,” Sarah said softly.

Sanford acknowledged this without emotion. The wiring had become tricky and was of far more interest to him at the moment. Later, he may feel some shame over this. Or he may not. Regrets could not put money in his hand and this heater could. Time eroded all things and sentiment too often went first.

“She says she attacked me too.”

“Denying it would not save her.”

She watched him change out a connector in silence, but as soon as it was in and secure, she said, “She said she did it and I let her say it.”

Sanford looked at her. “Denying it,” he said, “would not have saved her.”

“They put me on TV so I could tell everyone that the bug who hurt me got caught by the brave men and women of IBI.”

“And you did.”

She folded her arms, hugging herself like a parentless child…which she was, he recalled. That stirred some feeling in him, but it was not fatherly. He went back to work on the next heater.

“The way she looked at me…” Sarah closed her eyes. “She knew I wasn’t going to help her.”

“Couldn’t. She knew you couldn’t.”

“Stop trying to forgive me! You weren’t there!”

“No,” Sanford agreed mildly. “I was here.”

She quieted, color rising in her cheeks, and for several minutes, that was all.

“Sorry,” she mumbled at last.

“Don’t apologize.”

“I’m not saying…I don’t know what I’m saying.” She slumped back in the chair and rubbed her face, combed her fingers through her hair. It did not neaten her overall appearance at all, but he found the sight oddly agreeable. “I just…feel…awful.”

“It does no good to dwell on it.”

“I can’t pretend it never happened. I can’t…Tell me what to do, Sanford! I think about it until I make myself sick and then suddenly I’ll realize I’m not thinking about it and I’ll feel even sicker because how can I just forget something like that?” She picked up her cleaning rag, but only held it, twisting it weakly back and forth. “I’ll never make it right. If I could magically save a thousand other people, I still let her die. And don’t tell me she’s not dead. I know she’s dead.”

He did not fill the silence that followed with empty assurances. He simply dusted out the last heating unit.

“Tell me what to do,” she said again.

“What makes you think I know?”

Her brows puckered, confused. “Haven’t you ever done anything bad?”

Sanford coughed up a laugh. “No,” he said gravely. “Never.”

“You know what I mean.”

“And you know where I am. You know no one survives here without regret.” He removed the electrical cord and found a good one in his much-depleted box of parts. “You don’t need to hear the details.”

“I don’t want to hear the details, I just want to know how you…” She gestured futilely and let her hands drop, slumping back in the chair in defeat. “Forget it. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Sanford finished the last heater and replaced the casing. He found another rag and as soon as he started cleaning heaters, she joined him. The work went quickly with two sets of hands, but the quiet troubled him. He wished she’d hum.

He said, “I volunteered for this mission. The colony.”

She looked up, blinking rapidly, as if she’d been brought too suddenly into the light. “Huh?”

“Only the most elite soldiers were permitted to apply, but mine is a very old military family and even though it has been hundreds of years since the caste laws were rescinded, the old privileges linger.”

“Lucky you.”

“I thought so at the time. When I received my orders, I had them mounted on the wall so I could look at them every day. My father and his father came with me on the day of departure. My father’s father told me he was proud of me. When I looked back after boarding the ship, they were still there. My father saluted me.”

Sarah sat motionless, one hand resting lightly on one half-cleaned heater, listening.

“That is the moment where I choose to live,” said Sanford. “Someday, I will return to yang’Tak and see my father before me. I will stand in that moment again and finally move on.”

“And it will be like none of this ever happened?”

“Of course it happened. But I will leave it on Earth where it belongs. I will take my son and I will move on.” He glanced at the window, where the failing light served to remind him of time, and stood up. “Thank you for your help. Will you come to the Heaps tomorrow?”

She accepted his unspoken dismissal in good grace, finishing her heater and folding her rag atop it. “Sure. I guess it’s not a good idea to meet at your house every day, huh?”

“Probably not,” he agreed with a flick of his antennae. “But that isn’t why I ask.” He opened a drawer on his work table and brought out a scuffed plastic disc-case.

She took it, puzzled, turned it over…and clapped a hand to her mouth to muffle her breathy scream. In the next instant, she had thrown herself against him, bouncing on her toes even as she embraced him. “Aliens From Outer Space! Oh my God, Sanford! Where did you find this?”

He picked her hair out of his mouth, scraping his palps and clicking with satisfaction. “I’ve arranged for a private viewing room from noon until four.”

“I don’t believe it! Aliens From Outer Space!” She tore herself away, gazing into the scratched face of the movie case the way the television programs insisted women were supposed to look at jewelry and suddenly, she was crying. “I don’t believe it,” she kept saying, smiling, weeping. She hugged him again, her fingers slipping deliberately between his plates to brush at his sensitive pads, wanting him to feel her. “Thank you so much!”

It didn’t change anything. He knew she would still lie awake tonight, thinking of Baccus and all the things she might have said or done, and she might hate herself then for the joy she felt now, but for right now, this moment, she was happy. He had made her happy.

Sanford closed his eyes, letting all his world be her touch—just the tips of three fingers, the fluttering of a fourth. His heart throbbed.

“It’s a terrible movie,” Sarah wept.

“I know. I watched some of it, to be certain it was the right one.”

“How far did you get?”

“The wooden cage. And that…thing.”

“The starfish.” She pulled back, wiping at her eyes and smiling. “With an eye in its stomach. The one she seduces. You are definitely going to want to have that talk with T’aki.”

“I appreciate the warning.” He stepped toward the door and put his hand on its latch, but didn’t open it yet. “Tomorrow, then.”

She nodded, stroking the scratched face of the disc-case before reluctantly returning it to him. “Tomorrow. Be careful, okay? I mean, I know you are, but…”

She didn’t finish her thought. She didn’t have to. Being careful didn’t always mean staying safe in Cottonwood.

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that she did at least some of what she did for him. Some things she would do because she could see the evil here and, being Sarah, she wanted to ‘make it right’, but there must be ways she could fight IBI at a distance. She chose instead to walk Cottonwood’s causeways and smell its stink. To see him.

On impulse, Sanford leaned closer and gently breathed. She giggled—of course, what had he expected?—and then she tipped back her head and deliberately exhaled.

They shared breath. His claspers twitched; he kept them tightly tucked. ‘Not here,’ he thought, even as he refused to too closely examine just what he meant by that. ‘Not here. Not now.’

They breathed.

From somewhere in the folds of Sarah’s clothing came an electronic chirp. Her day was done.

Sarah’s expression at once faded and closed. She stepped away from him. “I have to go. Tell T’aki I said hi and I’ll see him tomorrow.”

Sanford opened his door. She touched his hand once more in passing, just the outer plates this time. If he hadn’t been watching, he would never have known. He watched from the doorway as she walked up the road and around the corner out of sight. Only when his vision began to drift out of color and into shades of grey did he realize he’d been holding his breath—holding the last breath she’d given him.

He let it go and went back inside. Tomorrow was just another word until he finished the work he had to do tonight. He sat down at his work table, picked up a rag and a heater and, without realizing it, began to hum.

* * *

It was just as bad as she remembered. No, it was worse. And it was wonderful.

The ‘private room’ was one of a series of pre-fab tool sheds shoved up against the movie house of the Heaps, with only a curtain and a narrow plywood hallway separating them from the main theater. She could hear War of the Worlds on the big screen TV there. Not the original, not even the Tom Cruise reboot, but something cheap and generic and entirely appropriate. The yang’ti who ran the place took Sanford’s chits and led them to their room. It had no lights. It had nothing at all, apart from the TV, a stack of various media players, a sagging sofa and a bucket. Sarah guessed the bucket might be the bathroom; there was a smell, not quite the stale-urine smell of Cottonwood’s ditches, but she pretended not to notice and as soon as the movie started, she honestly didn’t.

It was Fortesque at his finest, from the opening shot of the top-heavy physicist bending waaaay over her microscope to the heavy-metal end credits. It was all there, everything she remembered and little things she’d forgotten: the jungle room, with the tentacles coming out of the steamy pond to snatch away more of the plucky heroine’s clothes; the belly dancing scene at the banquet, where she used napkins as veils, somehow ending up less naked at the end than she’d been at the beginning; the thrilling golf-cart chase down empty halls, terminating in a death-defying leap across that inexplicable chasm. There was plenty of screaming and running and gratuitous boob-shots until finally, the eyeball-lamp king of the aliens came gliding across the floor towards that futurific bathtub. As the girl sensuously lay her hand against his glowing bulb, T’aki piped up with, “Ouch, bitch, my eye!” and instead of giving him a lecture on vulgarity, they’d laughed so hard that someone opened up the curtain and told them to be quiet.

It felt like the first time and she held on to that as hard as she could, because it felt like the last time too.

When it was over, Sanford took them all the way across Cottonwood for dinner. The eating place was all open-air and there was no menu, only half a dozen chain-link kennels displaying the stock they had available: goats, pigs, dogs, geese and chickens. There was also, their server informed them, half a cow in the back that was still ‘fresh enough’.

T’aki was all for beef, but the qualifier unnerved Sarah and even though she tried not to show it, after a glance in her direction, Sanford ordered goat. While they waited for it to cook, T’aki chattered happily about the movie and flew the Fortesque Freeship in circles around their table. When he at last bounced off to talk to the dogs, the quiet was like a weight.

“This is a bit extravagant, isn’t it?” Sarah said at last.

“Food chits are no use to me where we’re going.”

“Still waiting for Sunday?”

“Next Sunday.” Sanford looked away, watching T’aki at the kennels. The dogs didn’t know they were on the menu; tails wagging and tongues lolling, they tumbled over each other in carefree play. Dogs, like children, could be happy anywhere.

She thought of Fagin, felt a little guilty for missing her dog while thousands of aliens were imprisoned all around her in the slum built by the company she worked for…and missed him anyway. Sanford’s hand brushed hers on the small table. Without thinking, she found the soft skin between his hard plates and brushed her fingers back and forth just once.

T’aki eventually exhausted the options for playing with dogs through a chain link fence and came back to them, sprawling across his father’s lap and sticking his feet out for Sarah to hold. “That was a bad movie,” he declared.

Sarah didn’t argue, but said simply, “I like it.”

“I like it too, but it was bad.” He wiggled his toes in her hands, encouraging her to find his sensory pads and tickle. “And I only like it because you do. Why do you like it?”

It was almost, but not quite an accusation, as if he honestly felt she’d ought to have an excuse before she went around inflicting bad movies on the rest of them, with a faint undertone that suggested disciplinary action may be in order. Kids.

“I don’t know. Because it’s so silly, I guess. And because Fortesque never seemed to realize how silly they were even when he was the one making them. In his mind, it was all so gloriously possible.”

Sanford gave her an odd look—pensive and wistful and somehow smiling in spite of his alien mouth—but said nothing.

“I know they’re bad,” she said and laughed. “I know they’re awful. I don’t have any excuse for why I like them as much as I do. I was young, sure, but I was old enough to know what bad movies look like. If I have to blame someone…I guess I blame you. Not you specifically, just…you guys had only been here a few years and they were just breaking ground on the first camps beside Fairfield and it seemed like all the talking heads were saying that any day we were going to see you walking down our streets, living in our neighborhoods, shopping at our stores…” She gave T’aki an extra tickle and let go of his feet, letting him climb boisterously up his father’s back and jump off again. “Your kids going to our schools,” she said, and sighed.

“How frightening,” Sanford murmured.

“Yeah, I realize that’s what they were doing now, but at the time, it was wonderful. I couldn’t wait to go to school with all the little alien kids. That was the worst summer of my life, having to wait, believing every day that when school started again, half the class would be aliens. I drew all kinds of crazy pictures—little aliens with little lunchboxes and little bows in their hair…”

“Hair?”

“I was ten, Sanford. And they weren’t releasing pictures. Well, they were, but my parents wouldn’t let me see any.” She thought back to her orientation day and the video van Meyer had made sure they all saw. “Which is probably a good thing. The point is, I was ten, I was literally on my knees every night asking God for aliens when school started and then I saw this ridiculously bad, thirty-year-old science-fiction disaster and I just…” She groped for words and finally had to give up with another laugh. “It was like they tell you falling in love is supposed to feel like. That swoosh. That amazing electric suckerpunch. You know?”

“Yes.” Sanford pulled T’aki off his head and dangled him upside-down. “When everything seems possible.”

“I was ten,” she said again, still lost in memories of that summer, that wonderful movie and all the equally terrible movies to follow. “What I love the most is how unflappable everyone is. Aliens swoop in and abduct people, but beyond that first, ‘Huh. Aliens,’ moment, no one really seems to mind. In Sea Terror Attack, after the very first monster crawls out onto the beach and kills someone, a girl runs up to a lifeguard and screams, ‘Squidmen!’ and he just turns to his partner and says, ‘Get Mahoney.’ Like they had a protocol in place for squidmen all along. I loved that. Nobody ever panics in his movies. They just buckle down and deal with it.”

“Was there much panic when we first arrived in your world?” Sanford asked, allowing T’aki to arrange one of his arms so that he could swing from it.

She looked at him, startled. “Come to think of it, no, not really. I mean, I guess there was a little rash of incidents when you very first came in, mostly in the big cities…riots and stuff…but no.” She thought about it, putting herself back in the mind of the small child she had been, still smelling like campfires and fish, staring in wonder at the TV in the living room while her mother whisper-panicked at her father in the kitchen. “The military was already there. I guess there didn’t seem to be much point in freaking out. You guys were just floating there, not doing anything.”

“Ah.” He rocked his arm back and forth, helping T’aki swing higher. All his attention appeared to be fixed on his son, but he still had that weird un-smile. It was something in the lie of his antennae, the position of his facial plates.

“We just dealt with it, didn’t we?” Sarah leaned away from that a little, not quite amused, not quite appalled. “We just buckled down and dealt with it. Who would have ever known Fortesque would get something like that right? Yay for us.”

“Yay!” T’aki kicked his heels up all the way to the level of his head and let go, easily clearing the table with this impressive display, only to land on his back and skid a good meter across the ground. He giggled.

Their food came, delivered on fresh paper plates without the distraction of side dishes. In spite of her misgivings, it was perfectly fine—gamy, but tender, with a strong smoky flavor. Sarah usually took her barbeque smothered in sauce, but this wasn’t bad, if you liked it dry and didn’t think too hard about the condition of the kitchen.

T’aki devoured his as fast as his disapproving father would let him and, refueled, ran back to the dogs in their kennel.

“You still do, you know,” Sanford said suddenly.

“Huh?”

“Believe in the possible.”

“It’s different now. I used to be optimistic. Now I’m just gullible.” She shrugged that off and ate some more goat.

“There are worse things to be.” Sanford shifted around to watch T’aki. “Sometimes I wonder if he’ll miss this place.”

“He may not even remember it. He’s only three.”

Sanford raised his eyes to follow the line of the wall that surrounded Cottonwood. “He’ll remember.”

“We choose the moments we live in,” she reminded him.

He glanced at her, coughed out a laugh and resumed eating. “That sounds ridiculous when you say it in human.”

“Clicks make everything sound more profound.”

“You don’t mean that, but yes, they do.”

Her briefcase chirped. Sarah looked down at it in surprise, then opened it and pulled her paz out. She wasn’t expecting any calls and it certainly wasn’t late enough that anyone should be looking for her. She was out of her territory and she knew it, but when she tapped the screen, it wasn’t a security guard looking out at her, but only an e-memo telling her to come to the check-in desk at the Administrations building as soon as possible.

“I have to go,” she said.

Sanford clicked acknowledgement, already appropriating what remained of her smoked goat. “You should not come tomorrow,” he said. “You should be seen with your other clients.”

“I know. I will. Jellybean, I’m leaving!”

“It was a good day,” Sanford said as T’aki came to throw himself against her knees for goodbye. He didn’t look at her, appeared to be utterly absorbed with folding her paper plate around their combined leftovers.

She started to agree, to thank him again, and a new thought struck: Dinner and a movie. She laughed. “Do we count this as our first date?”

He neither laughed along nor seemed surprised, but simply said, “Our second. I count the night you took me home for first.”

T’aki leaned back to catch his father’s work-belt, then let go of Sarah with his feet and deftly climbed up to perch on Sanford’s shoulders. “I know where eggs come from,” he informed her.

The comment, so oddly/aptly juxtaposed with Sanford’s own, put a blush in her cheeks. “I have to go,” she said again.

Sanford still didn’t look at her, but he did scratch out a low chuckle of sorts, which prompted T’aki to join in with giggles of his own. Leftovers in hand, Sanford started walking, leaving Sarah to make her way out alone. She and T’aki exchanged final waves and then she got moving too, following her blinking dot on her paz through the maze of Cottonwood’s streets to the nearest checkpoint.

The guard there didn’t know her. While he ran her IBI pass-card and paz through his computer, Sarah leaned up against the gate and watched the yang’ti watch her. She didn’t realize she was humming until some of them started buzzing back at her, but they didn’t seem to be doing it in a mean way. The guard may not know her, but clearly, they did.

Eventually, the guard decided she really was who she claimed to be, even though she had no business being that person at his gate. She took the monorail to the main station and the elevator up to the lobby where she saw to her immediate disquiet that Piotr Lantz was waiting, watching the front doors.

“You’re not here for me, are you?” she asked, coming up behind him.

He put a hand on his rifle fast, then looked at her, and finally smiled (but didn’t move his hand). “You bet that sweet ass I am. The old man wants you.”

“Should I be worried?” she asked, as casually as she knew how.

“Naw. He doesn’t fire people in person.”

“So what’s it about?”

“He didn’t say, I didn’t ask.” He stepped onto the elevator, bodily shoved the intern already waiting there off, and beckoned impatiently. “I just know he’s been in meetings all day while I been trying to show the local rubes how to shoot one of these.” He hefted the rifle, which he still hadn’t let all the way go of. “You shoot, Pollyanna?”

“BBs and Lazer-Tag, both of them, like, ten years ago.”

“Figures.”

“I was good, though.”

“Sure you were. Those pop cans never stood a chance.”

The car continued up past the office levels to the top floor: van Meyer’s suite. Rumor had it that he lived here whenever he was in town and it certainly looked more like a five-star hotel than an office when the elevator opened. Piotr headed off down the hall and Sarah followed, glancing over each framed magazine she passed on the way. People. Time. Newsweek. National Geographic. Scientific American. Everything but Betty Crocker’s Kitchen and Rolling Stone, and for all she knew, he had those at some other camp.

Piotr knocked on the wide door at the end of the hall and opened it without waiting for an answer. The room beyond was easily the size of the whole house back in Brookings, tastefully decorated, but lifeless. Kansas didn’t offer much of a view, but what it had, it gave to van Meyer. He took it without compliment, standing at the glass wall overlooking his domain, shoulders straight, hands clasped behind his back, serene.

Was she supposed to wait for him to talk? Piotr was no help; he’d already found a good stretch of wall to lean up against while he went gaily shooting up Memory Lane.

Oh, what the hell.

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

Van Meyer stirred and turned, brows raised, smiling. “Miss Fowler! You catch me gathering wool. Please, come.”

She sat on the sofa he indicated, politely declined the drink he offered, and pretended not to be extremely creeped out when Piotr slipped silently up and stood behind her.

“I have exciting news,” van Meyer said, fixing himself a drink (but a small one, mindful of the early hour, quite proper). “But first, a question. What would you say is the purpose of Cottonwood? Piotr?”

“Containment,” he said without hesitation or interest.

“Miss Fowler?”

“Integration.”

Van Meyer smiled broadly. “Very good. And what would you say is the greatest obstacle to our success?”

This time, his question was directed solely at her and Sarah wasn’t sure what to say. “Public…opinion?”

He considered that, shrugged and nodded. “IBI do not suffer quite the same antipathy as police force, military force, but we do receive our share. In this country especially, it is encouraged to question authority. Ja, it is almost a suspicious thing when one do not. And yet, even here, public do respect us, admire us, and do you know why?” This time, the question was rhetorical. Van Meyer raised a hand to forestall answers and gravely said, “Because they need us. They need us to contain the bug, whom they fear. And after twenty years of our good work, I must confess they are quite correct to fear him. Even you, for all your admirable conviction, even you must agree.”

He sipped his drink. After an awkward moment, it occurred to her that he was waiting for her to do just that—to agree. Her throat tightened. She forced her head up and down, nodding. It was the best he was going to get.

He smiled warmly, pleased. “This is indeed our greatest obstacle and is a particularly thorny one, ja? Public resist integration because they fear the bug. They fear the bug because they believe him dangerous. They believe this because he is dangerous.” He spread his hands—a lone man, unarmed, helpless. “What are we to do?”

Again, he waited. She had no answer for him and finally had to admit it.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“But you do know, Miss Fowler. You intuit.” He tapped her on the forehead for emphasis, smiling his grandfatherly smile. Proud of her. And that was surely a part of his dark power, because even though she knew him, knew what he was and what he was doing, still it gave her that childish thrill to know she’d made him proud. “Every day, you go into Cottonwood. To see the bug? Nee. To see his young ones.”

Her blood chilled. Impossible as that should have been physiologically, she could feel it, cold creeping upward from her fingers towards her heart. She said nothing.

Van Meyer nodded again, as if she’d answered and her answer pleased him. He stood up and took his empty glass to the bar for freshening. “Some time ago, you tell me that you know it is not wise to love them. But the young one do come to see you in hospital, such is its devotion, and I begin to think I am wrong on one point. Perhaps they can love you back. So.” He turned around, raising his glass in an unspoken toast. “So, it is my pleasure to announce inception of new program in IBI!” He came back to the sofa and sat beside her, patting her knee. “You open my eyes to new possibilities. It is only right that you take largest role in this new reform.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Sarah said, but she thought she did. “You want me to…to come up with a curriculum for—”

“Nee, nee, such a big word. What I want from you is so simple a thing. As you know, the bug do not often make good parent. Young ones must be removed from his care with disturbing frequency and what to do with them? I want you to love them, Miss Fowler. And by doing so, perhaps you will train them to love us back. When they love us, when they want to make us happy, we will give them ways to prove it, ways that allow them to integrate more effectively.”

“With outwork programs,” she said. She felt no horror. She felt nothing at all, only the impossible cold and a mild confusion. Was it still today? Hadn’t she just been sitting with Sanford in that smelly little shed, watching a stripper seduce a floor lamp? Did she only dream that part? This couldn’t be the dream, she knew that; any dream this awful would wake her up.

“Outwork, ja, at first. And perhaps, as public opinion change…adoption programs.”

“Adoption.”

“Best for the bug, certainly, to be reared in a human environment. The camps…ah, we do what we can, but the bug is ultimately master of his own condition. We have done all we can for him. It is the next generation we focus on now and how to achieve his integration.”

“I can’t do that. I can’t—” She bit down on that with effort and said instead, “Sir, I barely got through high school. I’m sure you need degrees or something to do what you want. I’m just not qualified!”

“What is qualified?” he countered. “When I begin IBI, do you think I have degrees in alien management, hmm? Nee, I have only what you have—the strength of my conviction. Experience come in its own time. So it will be with you,” he concluded, reaching into his inner jacket pocket. He withdrew an envelope, but did not immediately extend it. He only held it and his expression, always difficult to read, grew even more inscrutable. “I do not make this decision lightly,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “And I must confess I am not entirely at ease, but after all is said, I believe you have much to offer, Miss Fowler, if your, ah, enthusiasm can be properly directed. So.”

He gave her the envelope. She took it. It was stamped with IBI’s logo—two big Is with that proud arch connecting them over a little B. The happy rainbow of bullshit, Kate used to call that. Sarah used to call it a bridge. IBI, triumphant, and underneath, their slogan. We do good work.

She opened it and took out two sheets of paper. That was all. Two printed pages that seemed to be a schedule. First on the list was Passport photo. Last was Land in Novokuznetsk. That didn’t sound like Kansas.

Sarah looked up. “I don’t understand.” She did. “Am I going somewhere?”

“Ja. I am sending you to Silverbrook, to take control of my efforts there to, ah, domesticate the young bug. Existing protocol has been some years in operation, but results have been…unimpressive. My people there do fine work, but perhaps lack your sincere affection.”

“I don’t…” Sarah shuffled numbly through those same two pages over and over. “Sir, I don’t even know where this place is.”

“Russia. The outer edge of Siberia.” Van Meyer rolled out another shrug. “There will be a car to take you the rest of the way in to Silverbrook.”

Sarah could only stare at him. “In to Silverbrook. In…to Siberia?”

“Is beautiful country. The weather can be at times severe, but you will spend most of your time indoors. The houses, much more comfortable, and IBI community, much more self-sufficient. They have ostrich farm on site. I know,” he said with a chuckle. “Ostriches in Siberia, but they tell me they do well.”

Sarah looked again at her itinerary, seeing only a meaningless jumble of letters, bringing nothing into focus until, with a start, she realized there were dates and times affixed to each point of van Meyer’s plan. “This says…Sir, this says I’m leaving tomorrow!”

“Ja?” Spoken with polite inquiry and no more.

“That’s not enough time! I couldn’t even pack that fast! I don’t know the language…I don’t even know where to look for this…this…Nova-kunu place on a map! And my van! How am I supposed to ship it to Siberia?”

He laughed at her, and yes, it really was a silly thing to say, but all she could think of. “We are happy to purchase at blue book, my dear,” he told her. “You will have a driver for all your needs, but you will find that Silverbrook is far more isolated than Cottonwood. Isolated, but self-sufficient. No one has personal vehicle there. As for pack, you will take only those few essential things with you and the rest will be sent. It is all arranged.”

It was the last straw she could see, so she grasped at it. Turning toward Piotr, she said, “But we had a date.”

“A date?” Van Meyer stared right through Sarah to his henchman, by all appearances thunderstruck. “You…date?”

Piotr’s mouth stretched, not smiling, but trying to fake it.

Now van Meyer looked at Sarah, a thoughtful look, the look of a man who had solved a thousand problems, but never saw this one coming.

“Friday,” she said. “I already bought the dress.”

His brows knit.

“A black one,” she said, and looked down at the papers. “The first fancy one I ever bought.” She’d bought fancy underwear too, all of it hanging from a hook in the bathroom, waiting to be put on. There was a garbage bag rolled up under the sink waiting for when she took them off again. She hadn’t thought she’d ever want to touch them again.

Van Meyer frowned and looked at Piotr. “You intended to do what, exactly?”

Behind her, Piotr shifted. “There’s a place in town,” he muttered, avoiding eye contact.

“Town?” he echoed sharply.

For the first time, Sarah saw Piotr’s temper flare in the presence of his employer. “What do you think, I’m going to make her eat off the fucking floor?”

In an instant, van Meyer’s black eyes took on the cold shine of space. “Perhaps you should have informed me of your intention,” he said quietly, setting his drink aside. “My plans are now made and I see no reason they should be altered to suit your social life.”

“Hey, I’m the not one asking, am I? But since you bring it up, thirty fucking years and I gotta ask your permission before I take a girl out? I ain’t your kid, old man! And what fucking business is it of yours where I take her?”

Van Meyer stood up and said something that wasn’t in English, cutting off this tirade while it was still gaining strength. There was a lot more, but it was all in that other language and now so were Piotr’s replies, first angry, then sullen, and finally grudgingly apologetic. At last, silence. The two men faced each other with Sarah small on the couch between them. Time has an entirely different elasticity in those situations, but she didn’t think it could have been more than a minute before van Meyer began to speak again. His words were not English, but his attitude was conciliatory, if frosty. He finished with, “And after all, it is none of my business, is it?” He gave Piotr a final probing stare, then smiled at Sarah. “Saturday, then. Saturday is soon enough. More time to pack, ja?”

“Thank you, sir. This is…This is an amazing opportunity.” She groped for something more to say, something to alleviate at least some of the suspicions that had caused him to extend this horrible offer, but came up completely empty. In desperation, she just stood up and put out her hand.

Van Meyer’s gaze dropped to study that. He laughed, very softly, and took it. His grip held on just a bit too long and squeezed just a bit too tight. “I believe I will miss you,” he mused.

“Thank you, sir.” She wasn’t sure that was the right thing to say, but her mind was still blank.

“Of course, I will see you soon enough in Silverbrook. And I am certain you will have the initial phase of your plan ready for my consideration.” He smiled as his grip flexed around her trapped hand. “I understand it may be some time before we achieve desired result, but if you can deliver me a domesticated bug within five years, I shall be extremely happy. But I am ahead of myself.” He released her. “In Silverbrook, there is time for all things. Now you go. Driver is waiting to take you for passport photo and necessary vaccinations. You will not be going back to work, far too much to do, but…why not? I will arrange for driver to take you into Cottonwood to collect your small bug. I know that you are fond of him and I see no reason you should not take him with you to Silverbrook.”

“Thank you so much,” Sarah heard herself say and then frowned. “But I don’t have a kennel or anything…and I’m going to be so busy packing that I really couldn’t give him the supervision he needs. Perhaps I could pick him up later? I would really like to do it myself,” she added. “I don’t want to scare him.”

“Of course. Saturday, then.” He glanced at Piotr. “After your date.” And back to Sarah. “So, it is settled. If you could escort yourself, Miss Fowler? Piotr, a word.”

Sarah turned herself around and put her feet in motion. The itinerary in her hands caught her eyes now and then, but the real events weren’t on it. Passports and vaccinations were nothing. The real itinerary, as far as Sarah was concerned, could have been written in three lines:

Wednesday afternoon to Friday night—keep away from Cottonwood.

Friday night—sex with Piotr.

Saturday morning—vanish from the face of the Earth.

* * *

The next few hours passed in an honest-to-God blur. She could remember the overly-white light of IBI’s medical wing, but not the shots themselves; the sound of one of those pinging machines a few curtains away, but not the face of the doctor who examined her, much less his name. The only proof she had that the photo session had even happened was the passport sitting in her hands. She sat in the front seat of one of IBI’s plentiful white vans and watched scenery, but it wasn’t until she saw Cottonwood’s outer security gate that she knew where she was. If the driver said anything at any point, she wasn’t aware of it. She may have answered if he had, but she wasn’t aware of that either.

She asked the driver where she could get good boxes for packing and he took her to the copy room in the Administrations building. It was late. The halls were dark, but not entirely empty. The good news had gotten around already and she was stopped several times by total strangers who wanted to congratulate her. One of them wanted to know if it was true that she’d be training the bugs to act as personal assistants and if so, what rank he had to be to apply for one. She had no idea what she told him, but she must have said something because he went away smiling.

She went home. She tried to call Kate. She didn’t want to, but it was the sort of thing a person would do and she was dead sure she was being watched tonight. She used the house phone even, but got Kate’s paz. She left a message, hoping she sounded surprised and buoyant, saying simply that she had big news and couldn’t wait to share it. She hoped Kate wouldn’t call back tonight. Tonight was going to be a bad one.

Sarah packed. Like everything else she did that night, everything she’d done since going to see van Meyer, she had no plan. It just sort of happened. She watched as if it were a movie on TV as her hands collected random objects and not-so-random objects and put them all together in just one box. When she was ready, she took it out to the van, sat for a while, then came back in and got one more thing out of her Sundries box, as yet unpacked in her living room. She put it in her official IBI briefcase and took that too. She figured she was ready.

She drove to Checkpoint Seventeen and parked by the gate. The guard tonight was Larry, which gave her a pang. It would have been so much easier if it were the jerk.

“I’m being transferred,” she called. “Think I can leave some client papers here for whoever replaces me? I’d hate to leave them at the office, that place is a black hole for important documents. But if I could just pin something up on your wall…? I’m sure it’d only be for a day or two.”

“Well sure, I don’t see why not.” And he opened up his door.

“Thanks, Larry,” said Sarah, taking her briefcase in with her. “I always liked you, you know. I mean that.”

He blushed, God bless him, and turned away to find a pushpin in his desk. “You know…I always kinda liked you too. It’s too bad we have to say goodbye so soon.”

“It is,” she agreed. “And I’m really, really sorry. Please try to remember that.”

She hit him with the briefcase. She’d never hit anyone before in her entire life, except once Kate with a roller skate, but that had been an accident—a high kick and loose laces. This was different, but it worked just fine. She was afraid it wouldn’t be like TV and that she’d have to hit him over and over and risk actually hurting him, but he folded up on the first blow and went down with a thump and a grunt, still breathing and not bleeding. Thank God.

Sarah opened her case and took out her Sundry, a roll of duct tape. One thousand uses, said the ads. One thousand and one was taping over Larry’s mouth and binding his wrists and ankles together before rolling him under his desk. She tried to make him comfortable and not leave him in a position that was too undignified. Then she took his gate pass and got back in the van.

It was a quarter past ten when she pulled up in front of Sanford’s house, but he had a light on inside. That was good. She opened the door, sending him and his friend leaping to their feet, then realized she’d forgotten to knock. “Sorry if I scared you,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Samaritan. We have to change our plans, Sanford. I don’t work here anymore.”

Sanford put down his can of beer hard.

Samaritan looked at him. “What plans?”

The rear door opened. T’aki stood there, naked and tiny, eyes huge. “Sarah? What’s going on?”

“The Fortesque Freeship is parked outside,” she told him. “And I’m putting you on it. I kind of hate to rush you, but I left a very nice security guard tied up at the checkpoint, and we have got to be back through it before someone finds him, so did you get the parts you needed from that one thing? Is your gadget fixed?”

Sanford hesitated. “It works,” he said decisively and moved Samaritan aside to access his secret room.

“Fortesque Freeship?” Samaritan echoed. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means we’re leaving. Want to come? Get your clothes, jellybean. You can get dressed in the van. Hurry.”

Samaritan was just looking at her. “You’re really leaving?”

She nodded, then had to put her hand over her mouth, positive she was about to throw up. She didn’t, so she nodded again. “Right now. Tonight. Come with us.”

His stare held a little longer and then he looked down, through the open hatch at the tiny crawlspace where Sanford was moving things briskly around. When he looked up again, he said the one thing Sarah never thought he’d say: “No.”

He sat back down and picked up Sanford’s abandoned beer.

“You can’t mean that.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean, caseworker. You don’t know the first fucking thing about me.”

He spoke calmly enough, not looking at her. Not caring. She couldn’t convince him. Well, maybe she could, but she didn’t have time. Or room in the van, she thought, and this ugly piece of practicality so horrified her that she reached out and caught his wrist.

“I don’t want to leave you,” she said.

His antennae lowered. He sipped at his beer and pretended he wasn’t attached to the arm she held onto.

She said, “Please.”

He looked at her. Below their feet, Sanford was moving things around. In the back of the house, T’aki was digging frantically through his bedding for his toy ship. A few hundred meters away, Larry the gate-guard was maybe conscious again and trying to get his hands on his paz to dial 99. None of it mattered. He looked at her and said, quietly, “You’re not a hero. You know that, right?”

She knew it. She couldn’t say it, but she knew it.

Samaritan nodded, rubbed the plates over his weirdly human eyes, and said, “Get your hand off me, caseworker. Go on.”

Sanford pulled himself halfway out of the hole in the floor. “Do you know how to shoot?”

“Me?” she asked.

Samaritan snorted loudly and gave her a shove toward the door. “I know how to point and pull a trigger,” he replied. “Why?”

“Lacking a plan…” Sanford bent briefly out of sight and came up again with something that looked like a miniature jet engine with a sword stabbed through it. He plugged his code-bank into the back of the thing; vents along the side lit up with a click and a whine. “…I need a distraction.”

Samaritan caught the gun when Sanford tossed it, coughing out an incredulous laugh. “I don’t remember asking you to make me part of your suicide pact. I could sell this and eat cow for the rest of my damn life. What makes you think I won’t?”

“Every minute IBI is looking here, they won’t be looking for us,” Sanford replied, climbing out of the crawlspace. He had a second, smaller gun slung over his back, his code-bank, and a dirty envelope stuffed to its limits with money.

“So?”

Sanford wordlessly handed the envelope to Sarah.

Samaritan’s antennae slowly flattened. “Fuck you,” he said. “Just…fuck you. I’m selling it!”

“No, you won’t. You can do what you want with the rest of them, but you’ll use that one. You’ll give us at least an hour.”

Sarah looked back and forth between them, too anxious to quite care about whatever she was clearly missing. Every second that passed, Larry was waking up and they were just standing here. “We have to go,” she said. “Please. Now.”

“Yeah, go.” Samaritan rather savagely adjusted components of the gun. He looked at the gun, at the hole in the floor, and back at Sanford. “Just how far do you really think you’re going to get?” he demanded.

“All the way to the ocean,” said Sarah, rifling through the money in the envelope.

“All the way to yang’Tak.”

“Are you sure you won’t come with us?” Sarah asked, sweeping up T’aki, his clothes, and his toy ship. “Please.”

“Hell, I’d rather stay and blow shit up than go and die horribly, which you will!” he snapped, directing this last at Sanford. His eyes came back to Sarah and his anger, although it did not abate, at least wavered. “This is stupid,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I’m doing the right thing,” she said, and carried T’aki out to the van.

“We’re going home!” he chirped, bouncing into the back and under the blanket. “Finally! Finally!”

Sanford came next, touching her arm as he climbed in behind his son, and she shut them away. She didn’t allow herself to hesitate. She walked back around to the driver’s side and swung up behind the wheel. She started to close the door; Samaritan caught it.

He looked different with a gun in his hand. Bigger. Meaner. And he was already plenty of both.

“I think you’re crazy,” he said. “And you’re going to be killed. Since I’ll never get another chance, I want to tell you that I think that’s a damn shame. And I just want to add that I think we both know that if I’d had you another five minutes in my house that day, I’d have fucked your brains out and you’d have loved it.”

“I’m going to miss you most of all,” Sarah snapped and slammed the door, half-hoping she caught a few of his fingers in it.

She didn’t. He waggled them at her as she turned around, and then she left him in the rearview mirror with the rest of Cottonwood.

Larry’s pass got her through the Checkpoint again, then through the village gate at IBI’s border. Then she tossed it and drove sensibly and well to Wheaton. At her bank’s ATM, she emptied her account, added the few hundred dollars she got out of it to Sanford’s thousand or so, then threw away her bank card. She threw away her paz as well, since she knew it had been through IBI’s hands for keying. She held it for a little while before she let it go, thinking of all the pictures and videos it still had saved to it…that voice-mail from Mom…that goofy frog cartoon her dad had done up on the animator app clear back when she was ten and it was brand new…even a picture of the house, unburned, and the four of them out front on the lawn, a family. But it had been keyed, she’d seen them do it right in front of her, so in the end, she opened her tight fingers and let it drop into the trash. Last of all, she took off her translator, which had been such a fixture to her head that it made her feel slightly off balance just having it off her ear. It sat in her palm like a spider, its tiny point-light gently blinking.

Ridiculous to think it was anything but a translator. Ridiculous to think that IBI could just punch in this thing’s serial number and home right in on her. They could get that through her paz; why would they need it in her translator too? Life was not James Bond and Mission: Impossible, and she had two aliens sitting in the car who talked mostly by pushing air out through vibrating mouth-palps.

She dropped it in the garbage next to her paz. Then she got back in the van and gripped the wheel tight. “Say something,” she said. “Please.”

“Then are we leaving?” T’aki asked, not quite whining, but bouncing with excitement, and Sanford said, “Can you still understand us?”

It was actually almost easier without the translator’s distracting echo talking in her ear, although she had to pay closer attention to the clicks. Still, she relaxed, just a little.

“Okay,” said Sarah, and started up her engine.

She drove, and the world kept right on spinning.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

He had never had a plan for the escape itself.

In the beginning, on the boats beneath the shadow of the ship, he had hopes of assembling the code-bank, creating some sort of diversion, destroying the humans’ floating city and being away in just a few days. Back then, his fantasies included the whole of his people—every one of them, saved—and himself back on yang’Tak a hero. But M’orr’ak had been killed and the rest of the code-bank thrown into the sea with his body. Then they had all been moved and eventually, all hope—had died. He no longer knew where the ship was or had any way to find it. The dream of escape and home-going had become just that, a dream, something to keep the will to live within him, a pretty story to tell the son he never should have had, a tiny light to hold against the dark reality of the immigration camps. No, he had never had a plan for the escape, but even so, Sanford was stunned that (for the second time) Sarah’s idea of simply throwing them in the back of her van and driving away had worked. Stunned and, honestly, a little offended.

All that night, she drove. At daybreak, she stopped to fuel the vehicle and to buy cold drinks for them to share. Then she drove again. She made only two stops that day—once, in the privacy of a wooded place for her and T’aki to piss, and once more at another fuel stop. She hummed a little in frantic fits, and twice he saw her wiping at her eyes, but she rarely spoke or even seemed to hear T’aki’s bursts of excited chatter.

Adrenaline can move a body only so long.

“You can’t drive, can you?” she asked suddenly, her voice strained.

“I can’t even fit in that chair,” Sanford replied. He’d been expecting the question.

The world rolled by.

“I have to stop,” she said finally, sounding both dismayed and apologetic.

“Of course you do.”

But she drove another two hours at least, looking for ‘a good place.’ She found it off the main road, in a small, spread-out town, at a place she called a ‘campground.’

“They’ve got cabins,” she said. “We need the privacy. We’ll spend the night. Just…Just one night and get a good, early start tomorrow.” She consulted her maps as she spoke. She looked terrified.

He wanted to touch her, to make her stop and see him, to make her move her mouth in a human smile. The sun was still bright and they were not the only vehicle parked in front of the campground offices. He could hear humans moving around them, calling to each other and laughing, some of them very close by. He stayed under the blanket on the floor and eventually she got out.

The place of cabins was very secluded and quiet, surrounded by tall trees and thick bushes. Sarah was gone a long time procuring one. She returned with several packages, some smelling of good cooked meat, looking only slightly calmer.

“Burgers for tonight,” she said. “And breakfast for tomorrow. Mostly doughnuts. I know you hate sweet things, but it’s the best I could do. There’s some bran muffins in there, they’re not as bad. I can…”

And then she just sat, staring out the window. At last she turned on the engines and drove a little further on, away from the road and the offices, to the cabin.

It was a larger building than his home in Cottonwood, but smaller than hers. It had been set well back from the others, and Sarah parked very close to the door and at enough of an angle that the necessary run from van to cabin was not so risky. The insides were comfortable and clean, if well used and sparsely decorated. It had a television, a tiny kitchen, a room with a hot shower, two beds in separate bedrooms, and a large brick alcove for a fire. T’aki, bound up too many hours in the back of the van, ran room to room flying his ship until Sanford made him sit and eat. It was good food, but Sarah only picked at hers. Ultimately, she put it aside and excused herself to a bedroom, claiming fatigue. She took her maps with her to sleep, he noticed. Sometime later, T’aki (who had eaten all his meat, but only half his bread and one vegetable slice) climbed down from the worn sofa and flew his toy ship away.

Sanford sat and watched television. The news mostly, for any report from IBI in general and Cottonwood in particular, switching over on every commercial interruption to run a restless eye over the other programs. There were far fewer channels than had been available at Sarah’s home.

The quiet unnerved him. When had that happened? He remembered enjoying quiet Before, on yang’Tak. It was what made him such a good prospect for lengthy missions in deep space, such as accompanying colonists to a new world and seeing them safely begun. But now it made him nervous. The small rooms seemed too big, too empty, too clean. Through the drawn curtains, the trees towered, moved, whispered. The scents were all wrong. There were no other yang’ti. None. Not for miles.

Sanford clicked despondently and heard his son’s answering rattle in the other room. Good boy. Just as he’d been taught. Stay close and always answer. Sanford switched off the television and went to see him.

The bed was the same size as the bed they’d slept in at Sarah’s house, as large as the rear room in his own at Cottonwood. T’aki sat in the center, swaddled clumsily on every side with sheets and blankets. Sanford neatened the nest, then knelt down on the mattress and watched his son run the toy spaceship back and forth over the same fold of cloth. Usually, this was an exciting game, less play than practice for the real thing, the home-going. Tonight, it was reserved.

“Will we be there tomorrow?” T’aki asked finally. His palps quivered. He was frightened, but trying to hide it.

“Three days, Sarah said. Perhaps longer. She has to be careful how to go.”

“Are they chasing us?”

“I don’t know.”

Back and forth went the ship. An endless flight. For a moment, Sanford could almost feel the hum of the engines under his feet, that comforting subsonic hum that meant the course was true, the universe at rest, and all was right.

T’aki let go of his toy and rolled onto his back with the impossible flexibility of the very young. He looked up at Sanford with arms and legs drawn up, and eyes deeply solemn. “Sarah is coming too,” he said. He tried to say it firmly, tacking it into place with clicks of certitude, but his fear betrayed him—in flat antennae, in too-soft tones, in the unhappy shine of his wide eyes.

“Of course,” said Sanford. He put his hand on his son’s chest and let it be clutched in relief. “She is you and she is me. We all go together.”

“—and she is me,” T’aki chanted, playing with Sanford’s fingers now, wiggling them one after the other all the way down to the inflexible points just before the line of his true spikes began. Sanford could recall doing just that with his own father’s hand when he was T’aki’s age. His heart throbbed a little, but in a good way. He realized he felt for the first time that this was going to work. They had not escaped yet…but they would. They truly would. His heart throbbed again, harder. He got up and took the spaceship out of his son’s nest, to set it on the small table nearby.

“Go to sleep,” he said, and came back to tuck blankets in around the obedient curl at the nest’s center. He bent to exchange breath and held T’aki’s a long time before letting it out again. Hope was in him like the heat of a living thing. “Go to sleep,” he said again, and turned his son’s lights off.

A bar of yellow under the opposite door told him Sarah was still awake as well. He didn’t need it. He could hear her mutters through the wood, her voice rising and falling in restrained tones of worry. He knocked twice, quietly, and went in.

“Sanford,” she said, but didn’t look up. She had her maps spread out on the bed before her. He was reminded of his son’s nest. “Did you watch the news?”

“Yes. There was no mention of us. They talked about crime, about your politics, about gas prices, and about dangerous bugs and why we must never be allowed to leave the immigration camps.” He snapped his palps to show what he thought of that. “There is a lot of smoke over Cottonwood. They called it a riot, which has been contained. I suppose that must be Sam’s work, but they didn’t mention an escape. There are no names, no pictures.”

“But IBI knows I’m gone. They have to.”

“By now, they must.” He knelt on the edge of the mattress to watch her in her anxiety. Her eyes seemed fixed, no longer seeing what she stared at as her hands shuffled papers around. The vein along her soft throat jumped, jumped. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are pursuing us.”

“Sanford, they have to be. They have to. But they want to keep the cops out of it, which means they want to take me down pretty…pretty hard.” She took a swift, shuddering breath. “Or maybe the cops are involved, but they’re keeping it out of the media. Maybe they’re putting up roadblocks or…they can’t block every road, can they? We’re going to lose time if we can’t use the freeways. And what if…What if they know where we’re going?” She looked up, her eyes huge and ringed with glassy white. “I mean, there isn’t much point in escaping if you don’t leave the planet, right? They have to know where we’re going!”

“Please calm down.”

“Sanford, tell me what to do!” she whispered. Threads of harsh sound cut through. She was fighting panic, did not want T’aki to hear her. “I’m not a soldier! I’m not even a social worker anymore! I’m…I’m ridiculous! Did you see what I packed? I’ve got my hairbrush and, like, ten bottles of water! I don’t know what I’m doing!”

“The best you can.”

She laughed. It cut his ear like a razor, rusty and too sharp.

“Breathe,” he said.

“I am in mortal terror.” She said it like she was reading it somewhere, in some amazement. Her eyes stared at him, through him. “I have never felt this way before.”

“Just breathe.”

“I’m scared to death I’m going to get us all killed. I can’t make even one mistake and I don’t even know what the mistakes are! I look at T’aki in the rearview mirror and I just want to throw up.” She started to say more, stopped, and rather obviously replayed her words, then turned pink. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“But they’re going to kill us if they catch us.” She looked at him again, that panic rising to take back her face. “So if they catch us—” Her mouth worked. “—then I’ve killed you!”

There. Named. She clasped a hand over her mouth and then the other over her eyes, which had begun to pour water. She made the sounds, the crying sounds, but softly, as softly as she could. It was all right. It was misery, but misery was better than panic.

Sanford took her maps away. She protested, but could not do so loudly without waking T’aki, so she was easy to ignore. He set them on the little table beside her just as he had done with his son’s spaceship, and then went into the washroom. He found a cloth and wet it, then looked at himself in the mirror. The thought came to him that he looked pretty good, all things considered.

She was still crying when he returned to her bedside, but her tears seemed to be running themselves out. She put out her hand for the washing cloth. He ignored it and moved back her hair to clean her face.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “God, you’re so calm. I’m trying to be strong, believe it or not, I really am, but wow, I am not cut out for this soldier-of-fortune crap. I just keep coming back to what could happen—”

He hushed her with soft chirrs.

“—and it just boggles me,” she went on. “How can this be happening? That’s what hurts the most…how can people be so mean?” She looked up, beseeching him, and he wiped down her cheeks. “First Contact was supposed to be this beautiful thing. I was happy when you guys showed up. I was happy when I heard about IBI forming and the camps being built.” Her face pinkened, turned away; he cleaned it, chirring. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this!”

More tears.

Sanford put the cloth aside and wiped them with his fingers.

“I have seen things that I could not imagine. Could not. And I’ve always thought I was pretty imaginative.” She tried to laugh and couldn’t. Her breath was very hoarse now. He could taste it when he moved his palps. It tasted of tears. “Stuff I can’t imagine is the stuff you’ve had to survive for years. I feel awful, Sanford. All the time. I…I hate myself for being human.”

He put both hands boldly on her face and made her look at him. “Do you see yang’ti?” he asked.

“What?”

He moved his head closer. His antennae twitched in her hair. Her face filled all his field of vision, as his must hers. “Do you see yang’ti?” he asked again, quietly but with sharp snaps. “Is this all you see when you look at me? A yang’ti who must be saved?”

Comprehension filled her eyes with horror. “No! No, that’s not what I m—”

“What do you see then?”

“I see Sanford,” she whispered. “My…M-My best friend.” A confession, naked and vulnerable. “I see a good father and a…a good man. The best man I know.”

His heart throbbed twice, hard enough almost to hurt him. Man. She saw a man. He said, “And I see a woman who has only ever tried to do the best she could. I see Sarah and we are the same.”

She reached up and touched his shoulder. Her fingers were small and very warm as they found the joint and the soft pads to receive her. She saw a man. Not a person, not a male of another species, but a man. She looked at him with the candor of a woman who looks at a man. And he wanted her—skin, bones, hair and all. He wanted to be with her. He’d wanted that for some time.

When he released her, she let her hands and her gaze drop back into her lap, sitting like a child who has been chastened. She did not seem to notice when he stood up and pulled away his worn shirt, unbuckled his belts. “I’m glad it’s you,” she was saying. “Don’t get me wrong. But if I was really a good person, shouldn’t I be willing to do this for anyone? I mean, I drove right past Mr. Samaritan’s house to get you and I never even thought—”

Her ramblings stuttered to a startled end as he lifted up the sheet and climbed onto the mattress beside her. She looked open-mouthed at his bare body. He leaned in to share her breath and began to unfasten her blouse. His heart was throbbing at every beat now, every beat.

“W-What are—? I mean, I can s-see what you…B-but you can’t po-possibly—” She looked down in astonishment as he exposed her bare chest, as if even she had never seen the human swellings there, with the colored tips he covered now with his hands. He stroked in short, gentle downward pats. The ridges of his fingers brought her tips out erect, just like in the programs. “S-Sanford!” she gasped, flinching back. Her hands flew up, but did not cover. They hesitated there, trembling slightly. “You can’t mean this! We’re not even s-s-sexually c-com-compat—”

“We could be.” And when she gaped at him, he clicked reassuringly and began to guide her up onto her knees to face him for another shared breath. This one, she answered, her lips parting even as she cringed uncertainly back. He stroked her swellings again and she shivered, arching her back so that she pressed against his hands, only to pull away again, her eyes huge. “I know what to do, I think,” he said. “I know your skin is fragile and I will remember this. I want to copulate with you, Sarah.”

Her lips moved. She seemed incapable of sound. Then she touched him, her fingers along his neck seams, where he could feel them tremble. He pulled the sheets away from her waist and found her final cloth layer. She helped him remove it and then knelt, shaking, waiting for direction.

“Are you frightened?” he asked.

She thought about it. “No,” she said, her eyebrows climbing as if in surprise. “I can’t be scared of you, Sanford. You’re my friend.”

“Then turn around, please, and bend forward. I will be careful.”

She stroked his seam once more, then obeyed, bracing her hands and knees almost in the way of a yang’ti female. He knew better than to mount her as one, however. He touched her instead, soothing her as his claspers tasted the air between her slightly-spread thighs. Her pheromones were alien, of course, but all the same female triggers were there, however faint. His belly-flaps relaxed at once; his spermatogus pushed slickly out, warming as her musk stimulated him. He reared over her, shifting his bent legs on the unstable mattress, and brought them cautiously together, penetrating not the ridged cloacal vens of a yang’ti woman, but the hot, soft, indescribable opening of his human, instantly and fully contained by her in welcome, in friendship, and in shocking heat.

His eyes shut. Softly skreeing, he brought her back against his chest where he could feel her heart pounding through his plates—a double beat to his triple, and yet somehow still in harmony. He wrapped both arms around her; she brought her hands up like fluttering moths to touch them and find his seams. He could feel her body in constant motion, not struggling against him or even attempting the movements of human copulation, but only twitching and rolling a little, trying to look at him and be still at the same time, just as the little sounds she made wanted to be words without knowing anything to say.

He began cautiously to move. It took a few seconds to get the knack of using just his hips and thighs without all his body, but the rewards were explosive. Her head rocked back fast, striking his shoulder. She bit her lip, her throat tight against sound, her features pulled strange with surprise, but beginning to soften and to fill with color. His claspers brushed thicker and thicker pheromones from the air, but he did not need it to measure her interest or hold his own. Her hands clenched on his arm, then shivered aside to find the joint of his wrist and his shoulder, to touch him the only way she could. He could not fathom what she must be feeling, but he moved as the male in the programs moved—or as near as he could approximate—and held her close against his heart, chirring.

There was no friction for him, or for any yang’ti. His pleasure in this endless moment was primarily cerebral. He could release his store of sperm at any time, but he held it for now, reveling in Sarah’s dance of mating. Her body moved, moved, and suddenly she slapped both hands over her keening mouth, moving back at him in rhythmless urgency, flooding the air with her human pheromones. Orgasm, he realized, and it did not paralyze her in place, but drove her to a kind of frenzy.

Encouraged, Sanford began to explore, trying to puzzle her out, to map and memorize her responses. He was surprisingly successful. Again and again, she climbed and lost herself, until all tension fell away from her imprisoned body. Her head dropped back, resting on his shoulder. She did not move even when he tapped his palps against her slender throat, but she answered his chirrs with humming and smiled. Her fingers twined with his, stroking his receptor pads in tandem with his movements.

Now, now, it must be now. Sanford picked up the bedsheet and wrapped them both together, holding them close as he injected his fluids uselessly into her body. The contraction keyed his own climax. For a slow count of ten, he swam in chemical bliss, perfectly still, aware only of her heat enveloping him, her heart and his in alien harmony.

Gradually, he came back. He tapped at her throat. She smiled without opening her eyes and hummed. The sound thrilled him on some level, urging him to stroke up into her in mating ways until she arched and moaned and released a final cloud of pheromones, its colors dampened by her exhaustion. Yes, it was late.

He retracted his spermatogus and tightened his belly plates, his claspers brushing fastidiously at him and her together all the while. Then he shifted her, lay her down, and lay down beside her. She did not speak, but hummed again, her hand brushing back to catch at his. She touched his pads, lingered.

Sanford chirred, exhaling over her naked back. He brought the sheet over both of them. ‘Well done,’ he thought, intensely proud of himself. He could not remember a more satisfying copulation. More natural, certainly, and more pleasurable, but never one so satisfying. He pressed his chest to her back, found her heartbeat and followed its song to sleep.

* * *

She was on the wrong side of the bed. She was naked. She was sleeping on what felt like a giant thorny log—that must be Sanford’s arm—but none of that woke her. And that was a deep, deep sleep. She had never been so relaxed in her life.

So why was she awake?

Felt like it was getting light, but light had never woken her before. She felt…itchy, indefinably itchy. Not on her skin, but on her air, if that made sense.

Slowly, Sarah opened her eyes.

And found them staring into T’aki’s.

His head only just came up to the level of the bed. She could see only the eyes and the round tip of his head, quivering with antennae. When he saw he had her attention, he reached up one arm and silently placed a doughnut on her pillow. His eyes were very solemn.

Oh dear sweet Jesus, she was naked in bed with this kid’s father.

Sarah smiled weakly, which T’aki apparently saw as an invitation to join them. He hopped up on the mattress and clambered unselfconsciously against her sheet-swaddled stomach, quietly chirping without words. Sarah made room for him, and Sanford’s other arm lifted from her waist long enough to rub affectionately at the tiny head. His slow, slightly asthmatic breaths had not altered. She hadn’t realized he was awake.

“Is this for you or me?” asked Sarah, indicating the doughnut.

“You. I eat too much now. My shell is tight. Besides,” T’aki said, pulling his father’s arm down to partially close him in, “those are gross.” He said ‘gross’ in English, and rolled the R heavily, then fell onto his back and giggled.

Sarah laughed with him. “That’s lemon jelly, kid, that’s good stuff.” She dipped her finger in it to taste, dipped it again for him—he opened his mouth palps wide to take it, then shuddered and drummed his legs in revulsion, cute kid—and finally sat up a little to let Sanford take back his arm.

“Well, thank you for the breakfast, that’s a lovely gesture. Think you can go play while I grab a shower and get dressed? We have a lot of driving to do today.”

“Yes-yes.” T’aki leaned over to breathe on his father’s face, then jumped across the bed and down, scampering noisily from the room. Must have damn near killed him to come in so quietly…

…and see her in bed with his dad. Sheesh.

Sarah fished her blouse up and put it on, reached for her panties, and saw them lying over one of Sanford’s tool belts. She stared at that for a while—Good God, we really did it—and then turned around and looked at him.

“It’s okay,” she said. Blurted, even. “If that was you trying to make me feel better. Last night, I mean. If you were…calming me down or…or something. Because, wow, it worked, I’ve never been so calm, but, um, I just want you to know that it’s okay if that’s all it was and you don’t want to, um…repeat it.”

His expression had not changed in the slightest all through this clumsy speech. Now he reached across the bed and patted her hand, just like he’d known she was going to do some blathering and forgave her for it, and said, “I learned how to move by watching humans copulate in movies. Do you wonder why I watched?”

She opened her mouth, blinked, and closed it.

He pushed back the sheet and got up, walking naked but not exactly nude around to collect his clothes. Where on Earth (so to speak) was he hiding his…self?

“I would not copulate with you in Cottonwood,” he said evenly. “But I wanted to. I don’t know if that act would have made that place seem better, or if that place would have made the act seem sordid, but I didn’t wish to risk it. I’m glad we are here. No matter what happens, I’m glad we copulated. No matter what happens—” He gave his palps a roguish waggle. “—I would like to copulate again.”

“I never saw this coming,” she heard herself say. “How could I not see this coming?”

“Because it was obvious,” he told her and sent her on to the bathroom with a pat. “And you remain sweetly above the obvious. Sarah.”

She stopped, turned around.

He set the doughnut on top of her little pile of clothes. “Please hurry,” he said.

Right. Because they were still escaping. Jeez, she really was relaxed.

Sarah showered, ate, dressed, her mind locked in a pleasant sort of fog—sweetly above the obvious, ha. When she was done, she sat down on the side of the bed and picked up her maps, most of them still pretty new, bought for the trip across country to her perfect new job. She’d even marked the route with her daily mileage and little notes, like Jackalope Museum or Weird Monkey Zoo. Fun tourist traps along the freeway…but there was more to the maps than the freeways.

When she emerged into the living room, father and son were together on the couch, watching the morning news on television. Some pandas had just been born in San Diego, which was the headlining story, followed by President Dufries’ extremely unpopular environmental reform bill, followed by a ten second blurb on a rash of flu-like illnesses popping up around Golden Plains and whether or not the bugs might carrying some unknown alien disease. No comment on the ‘riots’ in Cottonwood, and no comment on the rogue caseworker of IBI. When she sat down, Sanford switched the set off and looked at her.

She spread out the maps, one overlying the other, until she had made a more or less complete path to the coast from Kansas. She said, “Here’s where we started,” and drew a circle with her finger over the area where Cottonwood stood, unmarked by Rand McNally. “Here’s where we are now, roughly. And wa-a-a-ay over here…is your ship.” She tapped the ocean.

Sanford leaned forward, clicking thoughtfully, his eyes darting back and forth between those points. “A long way.”

“About two thousand miles by freeway, but we can’t go by freeway so it’ll be…I don’t know…twice that at least. And it’ll take God only knows how much longer because they don’t let you tear up those back roads at sixty miles an hour. I realize we’re in a hurry, but we’ve got to be sneaky about this. IBI is big, but they can’t be everywhere.”

“Agreed,” said Sanford and T’aki echoed, “Agreed!”

“I’m almost afraid to ask,” Sarah said. “I know we left a lot sooner than we were supposed to. But how much money do you have? Because I have enough for one more full tank of gas and that’s it.”

“A little less than two thousand dollars.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Sanford said calmly and T’aki hammered it home with a cheerful, “That’s it!”

Sarah looked down at the map and tried to see it in terms of gas stations and cheap hotels, knowing they would have to pay cash everywhere they went. “It’s probably enough,” she said. “But we better not eat too much. Now for the hard question. What the hell are we going to do when we get there?”

“Hell is a vulgar word,” said T’aki.

Sarah rolled her eyes. “What the heck are we going to do?”

“Heck is a vulgar word.”

She looked at him in surprise. “No, it isn’t!”

“It is if you use it to mean hell,” he told her piously.

Hard to argue with that…

“What are we going to do?” Sarah asked at last, holding out her hand to invite T’aki’s approval.

He chirred and rocked onto his back, grabbing himself by the toes.

“I don’t know,” Sanford replied, having waited patiently all this time for his son’s etiquette lesson to complete itself. “When they removed us from the ship, the humans had a number of flying transports in dock on the floating city. I had it in mind then that one of these could be seized or a human forced to pilot it, but it has been years. The floating city might not be there. Or there might be more of them.” He paused, palps scraping together and antennae low and twitching. “The ship itself may have fallen.”

“No, it’s still there.”

“Intact?”

“Looks that way from the pictures, but IBI doesn’t let anyone get too close. This is the thing,” she sighed. “We need to have a plan when we reach the ocean. Even something as big as your ship isn’t going to be visible from shore, so finding it may not be that easy. Plus, we don’t just have to get over to the ship, we’ve got to get up to it.”

“Where we may find that the hull has been breached by humans tunneling their way through locked doors or that they’ve pulled out the guidance system or dismantled a fusion nacelle or any of a thousand things I have not allowed myself to dwell on over the years.”

“Don’t, Sanford,” she said, pulling T’aki onto her lap and hugging him. “Please.”

He offered his open hand. She took it gratefully and found his sensory pads while he stroked her palm. “I have had no way to make a plan,” he said quietly. “I could not even begin. But the alternative is to do nothing and let it all end here, so the plan is this: We will go and we will do whatever we can. All right?”

Sarah shook her head and sighed. “Okay, I think you have the right idea.”

“You do?”

“About not allowing yourself to dwell on it, I mean. We can only do the best we can do.”

His hand closed over hers and lightly squeezed. “Yes.”

She smiled at him, thinking of his hands and the way they’d moved over her. She shook her head again, then leaned over and pressed her lips to the side of his face. He couldn’t feel it, of course, but it made her feel better. “Okay, I’m going to check out and bring the van around. You two be ready to duck in. Where’s the Fortesque Freeship, jellybean?”

T’aki raised it in one fist.

“Good boy,” she said, patting him. “Let’s get ready to ride.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

‘Back roads,’ she called them, which made Sanford wonder what forgotten corner of Hell they wound back to. They twisted, climbed, dipped, and sometimes seemed to break away altogether, tossing and jarring him until he was forced to come out from the cover of the blanket and sit instead on the uncomfortable seat, harnessed in next to T’aki, and bounced mercilessly inside his own shell. But no matter how slow the going or rough the ride, Sarah kept her good mood. They passed very few towns and could go for hours without seeing another vehicle, and that made her feel safe.

It made him feel exposed, particularly when the van seemed to have trouble climbing a hill, or when its engines unexpectedly whistled or ground together. On these occasions, even before he spoke, Sarah found it necessary to tell them that it was old, but it would get them there…a comfort she inevitably followed with disheartening mutters and stroking of the console.

Come midday, she stopped to refuel, then took them well out of town and found a narrow lane into the trees where they might risk a short recess, hidden from the empty road. This also made him nervous, but after two days curled on himself in the cramped vehicle, he needed the stretch. T’aki, of course, bounded off into the bushes at once, answering Sanford’s clicks as he chased insects and falling leaves, amazed by everything he saw.

“Ugh.” Sarah came around to sit against the open side door of the van. She picked through the box of food, ate the few crumbs remaining, and leaned back, covering her eyes. “Getting road blind.”

“Rest awhile,” he said.

“What, here? It’s broad daylight.”

“I’ll wake you if there’s trouble.”

“If there’s trouble, I’m not sure I want to wake up for it.” She smiled faintly, then shrugged and gave him an apologetic sort of look. “I tried to pick up some food at the gas station for you, but all they had was energy drinks and breath mints. Are you doing okay?”

For answer, he took her hand and stroked the palm, watching the way her face changed, the color rising in her cheeks, the slow curve of her smile. It was a look he’d seen often when he met her eyes in the van’s mirror, a look he’d first put on her by joining her in her bed.

T’aki raced by. “Everything’s alive!” he called, and plunged into another bush.

Sanford watched the branches shake, thinking that in less than two years’ time, T’aki could be playing this way in the same yard where he had played as a child himself.

Sarah’s fingers tucked under his plates and along his receptor-pads. She too was gazing into the trees. “I figure we’re about a third of the way there,” she said. “Maybe a little more. I guess it’s time to call Kate.”

“Kate?”

“My sister. We’re going to pass right through Brookings on the way to Salina, so I figure we’ll stop and change cars, in case they’re looking for this one…which they almost certainly are. Also…she’s my sister. I have to tell her what’s happening to me. She’s already scared half to death, I’m sure, then I just disappeared.”

“Is it safe?” he asked, knowing it was something of a foolish question.

“It should be. I picked up a disposable phone at the gas station.” She released him with a snort to crawl back into the van. “Mind-boggling. They didn’t have beef jerky or a soda cooler, but they had disposable phones and sixty different app-cards. Anyway, it’s totally untraceable to me and I’m only going to use it once. Besides, seriously…” She re-emerged, no longer smiling, clutching a package in her hand. “How safe are we, like, ever?”

He had no answer to that, but touched her again and chirred, then left her in privacy and went to find his son. His loud click brought an immediate rattle and he followed it to a small clearing where T’aki crouched, watching a mass of ants swarming over a small, dead animal.

If this were Cottonwood, there would be a fight already over this carrion. There might be one over even the ants. Now, well-fed and on the road to the ship, it was a mere scientific curiosity. Sanford hunkered beside his son, watching T’aki rather than the grisly work of the ants, and listening to Sarah’s voice through the trees.

“—you hear me? How about now? Okay, great. I’ve got, like, one bar of signal strength, so I have to make this…Yeah, I know. I’m sorry, I know it was cryptic, but that was on my house-phone and I…No, I threw that one away. I’m not a complete idiot after all…This is a junker, can I talk now?”

“Who is Sarah talking to?” T’aki asked, poking at the miniature feast with a twig. The ants swarmed faster.

“The sister, Kate.” He put hard snaps in the name, hissed to himself, and tried again, with the same result.

“Kate,” echoed T’aki. He did not snap over the hard sounds.

“—don’t feel comfortable getting into the whole thing on the phone, even this phone, but I’ve left IBI and…Yeah, I don’t think they’re going to sue me anymore, I think they may just shoot me…Only sort of kidding. It’s bad, Kate. Feel free to tell me you told me so.”

T’aki looked away from his ants. “Is it bad, Father?”

He rubbed the boy’s head. “It will be better soon.”

“—I know it’s a lot to ask, but…No, I actually have plenty of money, what I need is your car…California…Believe it or not, you’ll probably guess why the instant you see me. It isn’t very subtle.”

Sanford chuckled and then sighed. No. No, she wasn’t very subtle at all, was she? But she was earnest. And honest. And good.

“You’re chirring, Father.” T’aki left his feasting ants and crawled up into Sanford’s arms. He fanned his tiny palps for breath, then snuggled in against his chitin. “Sarah sounds scared.”

“She is doing a frightening thing.” Sanford stood up and carried his son away from the little pageant of death to a place where things only grew. There were birds in the high branches and iridescent insects fluttering through the air, bright berries on the low shrubs and leaves just beginning to turn. T’aki twisted around to look, but listlessly. “We are all doing a frightening thing,” Sanford said, rubbing his son’s shoulder-seams. “But it will soon be done. We’re going home.”

“—I know, and I wish I could tell you more,” Sarah said distantly. “I’m so sorry…Yeah, I know, but I’m still sorry…I’m not sure. What’s today?…Okay, so maybe as early as Sunday night, but probably Monday, assuming the van holds together. It didn’t like making this trip the first time and that was on the good roads…No, I’m not trying to scare you, sorry.”

“I’m not scared,” said T’aki, and perhaps it was true, but he was obviously nervous.

Sanford rubbed his head. “Because you are very brave. No father before me ever had such a son.”

“—no, I really can’t…I can’t, but I will when I see you, I promise…I love you too, Kate. So much. I’m sorry I’m doing this to you, but it has to be done. I know you’ll understand when I can explain…Yes,” she said, quietly but with great emotion. “I am. In fact, this is the best thing I’ve ever done.”

“Are there birds on our world?” T’aki asked, looking up.

“Of a sort. There are animals who fly. Some are quite pretty. In my family’s house, where I hope to live, there is a garden where these animals come. One of my far-fathers built them shelters and feeding stations a long time ago. I used to chase them when I was younger.”

“Why?”

“My older brother had joined the boys’ ti’yan’ league and I was largely unsupervised during the summers when they played. I found shameful ways to entertain myself.”

“Is it a game? Like baseball?”

“It is a game. Not like baseball.” Sanford glanced around and saw the van through the branches. Sarah sat against the door again with her head in her hands, no longer speaking. “Shall we go back?”

T’aki snapped his palps reluctantly. “This is a long drive.”

“The ride to yang’Tak is much longer.”

“Yes, but the ship is bigger and it won’t bounce around. I don’t like the bouncing.” T’aki brightened. “Can you teach me ti’yan’?”

“I think so. It won’t be a true game with just the three of us, but it will pass the time.”

“I want to be on Sarah’s team.”

“All right,” said Sanford, puzzled. “Why?”

“Well…you get to play with her all night. I want her during the days, okay?”

This was perhaps the time to sternly set Sarah above those possessions which may be loaned out at will, but Sanford, amused, said instead, “I think that’s fair.” He set his son down and they walked together back to the van, this pleasant respite over and the heavy business of their flight once more upon them.

Sarah wiped her eyes before she raised them to his with a smile. Her cheeks were wet.

“Father’s going to teach us a game,” T’aki announced, jumping into the vehicle. “When we go home. I want to be on your team.”

“Okay,” said Sarah, looking surprised. “But why?”

“Where is your ship?” Sanford interrupted, and T’aki, immediately alarmed, leapt back out and raced into the bushes.

“It—T’aki, honey, wait! It’s right here under the blanket,” she finished with a sigh, watching the boy tear through the trees. “Well…I guess he’ll be back.”

“Are you all right?”

“Oh sure.” She looked at the phone, sighed again, and tossed it into the forest. “I’m scaring the hell out of her, that’s all. I know I’ll be there soon and it’ll all work out, but in the meantime, she’s frantic and I don’t think I calmed her down any.”

She sat there, watching the path of T’aki’s destructive search while Sanford watched her. At last, she stirred and said, “She’s my only family. I’m hers. We’re all we’ve got. I must be a bad person because all I can think about is going to see her and I know it’s going to put her in danger, if she’s not already. I don’t think IBI knows I have a sister, but they might. I haven’t been very smart about making phone calls. If they check my paz records…” She sighed and rubbed at her face, muttering, “And they will, you know. They probably did that first.”

He had nothing comforting to say.

“I tried to tell her to leave, you know? That we could meet up somewhere. She wouldn’t do it. Said if they weren’t onto me yet, her disappearing would put them on us for sure. And she could be right. She’s a lot more visible than I am…has a job and all that. She says nothing will happen as long as she stays in public places.” She shook her head. “God help me, I think being stupidly idealistic must run in the family.”

“So does courage.”

“And so do crooked pinkie toes, which is about as use—T’aki! Jellybean, it’s right here!”

She did not finish her remark, but only helped the boy up into the van and into his harness. Once he was settled with his ship, she cleared the door to let Sanford enter, but stopped him as he bent and put her arms tight around him. “Stupidly idealistic as it may be, I’m not scared when I’m close to you,” she whispered. “So I’m going to drive as fast and as far as I can tonight and not think about things until I can be close to you again. I…I needed you last night, Sanford. And thank God you realized it, because I didn’t, but I do now and I think I’m going to need you a lot before this trip is over.”

He realized she was trembling. He couldn’t feel it, but he could see it in the slight shiver of her hair as she pressed herself against his chest-plate. He stroked her shoulders soothingly, chirring soft and low, and wished he knew what he could say to her. In the face of this great silence, he could only cup her cheek, tip back her head and gently share his breath.

She giggled, rolled her eyes, and finally breathed back at him. “Thanks,” she said, hugging him once more, but without desperation. Then she walked around and got in behind the console.

Sanford let himself in and shut the side door, then sat sidelong on the cushioned bench in the back of the van and fastened his harness. It wasn’t quite the reaction he’d been hoping for, but he’d take it. At least until tonight.

* * *

She drove until midnight before she even started looking for a place to spend the night, partly to eat up the miles and partly to make sure it was good and dark when they did stop. Midnight brought her to one of the bigger little towns on an old logging highway—just a few streets’ worth of tin-roofed bars and antique stores that looked like junkyards, broken sidewalks crawling with stray cats and trash, and way too many kids slouching around the alleys for the late hour. It was the kind of place that would have scared her if she weren’t looking for someplace seedy and out of the way. The motel was, by that definition, perfect: a dirt lot, flashing neon sign, no street lamp, and two long banks of mostly empty rooms to either side of a run-down office. Perhaps the best testament came from T’aki, who, bumped awake on turning in, raised his head and fearfully inquired, “Did we go home?”

The manager’s office stank of cigars and sweat. For amenities, it had a bank of vending machines opposite the front desk selling snacks, sodas, cigarettes and pornographic video cards for every major brand of paz. Decor was limited to a rusty saw mounted over a couple of moth-eaten deer heads on the wall. The manager himself was fifty-ish, shiny-bald, and stonily indifferent about being dressed in boxer shorts and a bathrobe as he sat in his recliner and watched TV. A sign over the desk informed Sarah that payments made by credit card or e-Bank required identification and paz verification. Beneath this, in slightly larger typeface: If you have lost your paz, customers must pay cash as well as $50 liability fee. A second sign advertised the rates by hour, night, or week. She signed the log book in a false name and wanted to wash her hands after touching just the pen.

“How many?” grunted the manager, having apparently decided she wasn’t going to leave on her own.

“Two adults, one child,” she answered. “Just the one night. Um…do you have any adjoining rooms?”

“Got two, both doubles. One of ‘em comes with a kitchen. Looking to kick up some dickens, eh?” He glanced around, but his casual leer puckered in on itself once he saw her. She had a brief moment of panic (My picture’s been on the news! He recognizes me!), and then caught a glimpse of herself in the window glass: her hair, tousled up around the bald patch over her ear; her rumpled, slept-in clothes; her exhausted, bloodshot eyes. No, she couldn’t even make a sleazy motel-manager’s dickens-kicking fantasy.

His eyes dropped to Sanford’s weathered envelope as she counted out the money, then lifted just far enough to ogle her breasts in a dispirited fashion, and finally came back to her face, not without a wince. He passed the key over—a real metal key, they really were in the boondocks—took her money, and grunted something that may have been goodnight.

And so all was well with the world. The room was the last on the leftward stretch, in the darkest and most deserted part of the lot. She parked the van nose-out and at an angle, so as to give better cover to anyone darting from, say, the passenger side to the motel, and unlocked the door for them.

T’aki was inside at once and bouncing on the bed. It sure didn’t take him long to snap out of the sleepies. Sarah dropped her maps on the fire-sale table (no chairs), and watched him jump ever more acrobatically back and forth between the two beds until he inevitably overshot one and went into the wall.

She shouldn’t laugh, she knew she shouldn’t.

“And what have you learned?” asked Sanford calmly on his way to the bathroom. He didn’t even look around.

T’aki, sprawled on the floor with both legs in the air, giggled.

“Come on, jellybean, time to pick a bed and start settling down. You want one of these or would you rather see the other room?”

He would, and after marveling at the two doors that separated them (and the key which unlocked them, a process he seemed to view as almost magical, which was strange right up until she realized there were no locked doors in Cottonwood and no metal keys), he knuckled down to the serious business of selection by way of the spring-test. Sarah waited him out, admiring the easy energy of his young body after the gruelingly long ride in the car, until he dropped onto one mattress and lay spread-eagled and happy.

“This one,” he said.

Sarah could hear the shower in the other room, so she went ahead and helped T’aki pull up the bedding and wrap it around in a heap with him at the center, the way he seemed to like it. She got him a glass of water (well, a cheap paper cup of water), gave him the Freeship, and then sat down on the bed beside him and looked at him.

“How are you feeling about, um, about the way things are between me and your dad?” she asked.

“I like it,” was his immediate and unconcerned reply, all his attention on flying his ship over his pillow. “It’s like having two fathers.”

She processed that, decided she could live with it and reached down to rest her hand on his chest. “You know I like you lots, jellybean.”

“I am you and you are me,” he answered matter-of-factly, then tipped back his head and fanned his palps and waited.

She got it after a moment and bent to breathe gently at his open throat. He breathed back at her, then snuggled down in the sheets, curled tight. A pat on the head, a tickle on his soft neck, and she left him lying quietly and closed the door between them.

Sanford was out of the shower already, at the end of a neat row of wet footprints, studying the tired landscape hung between the two beds. He was naked, chitin dripping and shiny in patches, dulling where it had begun to dry. There was such a relaxed and easy expectation in that posture—waiting for her—and it would have raised her eyebrows except, of course, why else had she gotten two rooms? It was as good as announcing to both of them that she was in the mood, so take your toy, kid, and don’t mind any loud noises.

He glanced around at her giggles, but seemed satisfied it wasn’t at his expense when she came smiling over and slid her fingers along his side-seam. “Are you tired?” she asked.

“Exhausted,” he replied seriously. “I will sleep very well after we have copulated.”

Gosh, she loved this guy.

“You need to tell me what to do,” she said, undressing. “Because last night was mine and it was wonderful, but I want to make you happy tonight and I don’t know how. Tell me how to touch you.”

“It does not matter how I am touched,” he told her, pulling her blouse over her head. He dropped it indifferently on the pile of shoes, socks and jeans, and then ran his hands over her breasts. “Only who I am with. And I am with you.”

His claspers darted out, tickling at her belly and thighs as he cupped her elbows and brought her half a step towards him. Only that far, no closer. He held her lightly in his hands, very still, gazing at her. His palps were spread. Every breath they took was shared. Apart from his claspers tickling at her thighs and some small twitches of his antennae, he was motionless, serene. Enjoying her nearness, as foreplay.

And it was enough, bizarrely. She wasn’t in the least impatient as she rested her arms on his and looked up into his eyes. Quite the contrary, her excitement seemed to be spinning up in a slow and lazy way, not a tension so much as a peaceful anticipation. She remembered with sudden and almost painful clarity the end of That Talk with her mom at the insufferable age of fourteen, when her mother had concluded the facts portion of the program by telling Sarah that sex was more than just mechanics and feeling good, it was an emotional and spiritual thing. “And that’s why you should wait until you are married,” she’d said, cementing firmly in young Sarah’s mind the idea that her mother could not be any lamer if she’d been born without legs. “Because it’s all candles when it’s for thrills, but when it’s with the one you love for all time, it’s the sun.”

Sex with this particular man was never going to be normal or comfortable or completely free of that awkward “you’re stabbing me with your shell” whisper, but it was still amazing, mind-expanding, world-defining sex. Not because of what he did, but because of who he was, and knowing that anything he did do was solely because he wanted to please her.

“I am ready,” he said at last, emotion as a tight timbre under his words. “Please turn around.”

“I’m not done admiring you,” she said, and he chirred raggedly. “Can you sit on the bed, there on the side?”

He could, but not comfortably. His feet flexed on the cheap carpet as he shifted his legs back and forth and finally stabilized. He watched her step out of her panties and stand as naked as he was. His claspers brushed over her sex, feathery and very inappropriately ticklish. He didn’t seem to mind her laughter. His lower abdomen heaved a few times, as with heavy breathing, and then the plates slid apart and she saw what he’d used so well to love her the night before.

Long and much thicker at the base, tapering almost to a point, it pushed smoothly out and upward in an obvious curve and glistened, expectant, in the air. She touched it, knowing he couldn’t feel her hand, but touching gently all the same. It was all chitin, as unfeeling as his arm or his chest, and had no give at all when she squeezed, but was very minutely flexible, due to the many thin plates of overlapping chitin (she remembered that, all right), right up to the tip, which was ridged with three pronounced rows, like the threading of a screw. It was hollow, and standing over it with the light above them, she could actually see the wet shine of his fluid inside it.

“I wish you could feel me,” she said.

“I do. I feel your heat.”

“Then let me share it.” She slipped her arms around his shoulders and straddled him, easing herself down over his stinger-like member, shivering as she felt those amazing ridges penetrate deeper and deeper. His claspers slipped around her and tucked up, brushing at her from below as she indulged herself in just a few slow, sweet strokes along that alien thickness, and then she moved her legs around his narrow waist, where the thorns on his hips and thighs couldn’t gouge her.

They sat, eye to eye, his hands splayed and motionless on her back and her fingers sliding gently along his shoulder-seams, their hearts pressed together. Her hips rolled in soft, tight circles, just enough to keep her high and free at the cusp of climax, and now and then, it would feel so good she had to close her eyes and concentrate on moaning quietly so she wouldn’t wake T’aki in the next room. When she came, it was the sun, just as it had been before, just as she’d been promised, and it burned behind her eyes forever as she felt the cool wash of his cumming deep in her womb. His arms were dead branches at her sides, his chest the trunk of a petrified tree, and his palps like bony fingers tapping insistently at her head, and it was all right, all good and golden because she loved him.

They stayed together maybe half an hour after (he came again; she felt it and heard him chirring after that weird paralysis relaxed), and finally, reluctantly, began the laborious disengaging process so that she could have a turn in the shower.

The doors between the rooms were open when she got out, dressed again in her rumpled clothes. Sanford lay with T’aki in the queen-sized bed, dozing with his son in the crook of his arm. Without hesitation, or really thought, she padded in and slipped under the sheets on the other side of the boy’s nest. Bodies shifted, making room. They came closer, naturally and without words. She saw Sanford’s eyes shining in the darkness, and then he closed them and chirred softly, content. ‘I am you and you are me,’ she thought.

Simplicity itself.

* * *

Old men sleep little and guilty men, less. Van Meyer, who considered himself neither old nor guilty, slept only four hours each night, if that. He was awake therefore and gazing out his sitting room window at Cottonwood when Piotr called on him. The scent of frustration was a sharper tang than smoke around his faithful hyena tonight. He did not ask how the hunt had gone.

A metallic rattle on the floor behind him. Van Meyer glanced around, knowing what he would see. The girl’s translator. Ownerless, no doubt, and no trophy of the kill.

“I would have let her go,” van Meyer said, turning back to the window, to his city. “If she had gone to Siberia as I wished, in a year’s time, her contract elapsed, I would have let her go. Do you think I care for the modest mischief of one little cook-out, eh? I do not. It is a small matter. If she wish to stay on at IBI, I would have allowed this also.”

Piotr said nothing. He breathed, hot and hoarse.

“So what happened, hm? What happened after she convince us so prettily to let her have just a little more time? At 10:14, she use security card to pass Checkpoint Seventeen. At 10:21, she leave again. And at 10:42, the fence surrounding recycling depot is, in plainest terms, de-atomized. Is this co-incidence, Piotr? Eh? Nee!” Van Meyer stared hard into the darkness, over the wall, into the silent alleys of his camp where few lights were lit, but where points of fire still burned. “She take bug-guns into my city. She give them to bug. When did Pollyanna get the bug-guns? How? And how is it that none of my fine security guards do not see her or even find them missing?”

Of course, his hyena had no answer.

“Now she is gone and my camp burns. Distribution warehouses full of bug food blasted open and emptied. Emptied! Riot across whole sections. Smoke enough that even sheep see and send their cameras to record. Better men than you rush in and do not rush out again, but I do not blame her, Piotr. She does not betray me. She is true to her wounded woman’s heart. Nee, I blame you.”

“Sir, I—”

“It is enough, I say to you. Let her lie in her bed of nails. She is contrite and no more is necessary. Longer than you have lived, I am a judge of such matters. I say she has learned her lesson, but you must have your fun. You defy me and you hurt her.”

“She never saw me,” he said sullenly.

“What matter? She knew. Do not doubt, after these events, that she knew, Piotr, and she has been planning vengeance all this time. Ja. Because you hurt her.”

“She fought back.”

“Did she? So severely she must be stomped upon until her guts burst? Perhaps I should send you to Siberia and hire her for my bodyguard.”

“Sir—”

“Shut up.” In all the years they shared, he had never said those two words to Piotr Lantz, but he said them now and they were obeyed. “Ja, she fight back. I’m sure she fight back. Great brute that she is, the wonder is only that she did not kill you. Nee, you live and my contrite Pollyanna is taken to hospital. And she come out hurt, wanting only to hurt me. Clever Pollyanna,” he mused, looking out the window at the glow of fire in Cottonwood. “She know just how to hurt me.”

“I’ll find her.”

“You? I have other men,” van Meyer said with a dismissive wave. “I think I am done with you for a time.”

Piotr did not retreat. Instead, he came two steps closer, lowering his head like an animal that means to charge. “I wasn’t the only one she fooled.”

Van Meyer spared him a contemptuous glance and then another, more thoughtful look. “Nee, you were not. She has told me lie after lie. I see this now. She has lied to me with every breath.” He allowed himself a pang of honest admiration for the audacity of this truth before crushing it. “You, she merely offer to fuck.”

His hyena bared his teeth at the master’s back. Van Meyer saw it in the window glass. He turned around.

“But as you say,” he said, “we were both fooled. So. Against my judgment, I allow you this chance. I want her back, Piotr. And until she answer my questions, you are not to harm even one hair of her. You have bitten me once. Next time, I do not forgive.”

A thousand thoughts moved in his hyena’s eyes, but, “Yes, sir,” was all he said.

“Perhaps now that you are done chasing her transmitter signal across town and back into the Heaps, you will condescend to chase the girl. Find out where she is going. And go quietly. I will tolerate no more mistakes from you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And remember, not one hair of her until she talks to me.” Van Meyer drew the curtain on the smoldering glow of his city and turned around, neither an old man nor a guilty one, but an aged and still venomous cobra. “Afterwards, I do not care what you do with her.”

“I’ll find her, I swear.”

“For your sake and the sake of our long friendship, you had better.”

Another flash of sullen fang and Piotr was away. Van Meyer watched him go, then walked to the bedroom, ready at last to sleep

.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

She drove through the day and then right through the night again, although she hadn’t planned to. The back roads were so much slower-going than the freeways and the hours had a way of slipping by unnoticed. Midnight came and she still felt fresh, so she drove. At two, another town came and went. T’aki woke up at the gas station to sleepily inquire if it was “Motel time yet?” but Sarah kept going.

By five a.m., she knew she was losing her edge, but by then, the sun was coming up and she knew the light would bring her around. Which it did, some. And crossing into her home-state of Oregon gave her an even bigger boost, especially when the grey skies opened and sprinkled her with a little welcome-home rain. But these were short-lived rejuvenators and they still had a long way to go. She began to yawn, and then to stare, and was finally forced to snap on the a/c and the radio to help keep her awake.

“Perhaps you should find a place along the road and rest,” Sanford suggested and T’aki, curled small around his seat belt, moaned, “Motel time, okay?”

“Jellybean, checkout in most motels is, like, in four hours. It’s still a long way to Salina and we don’t have so much money that we can afford to blow the cost of a whole night’s stay for just four hours of sleep. And it’s not exactly legal to just pull over and sleep anywhere. The first cop that came along would want to know why I was doing it, and I can’t risk you being seen. Besides,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “I’m catching my second wind. First place I see, I’ll get some coffee and I’ll be just fine.”

“You look exhausted.”

“Would you like to drive?” she asked sweetly.

His antennae lowered. She felt immediately ashamed of herself and turned the radio off again. “I’m sorry, that was bitchy.”

“Bitchy is a vulgar word,” muttered T’aki, playing with his ship.

“Yes, it is,” she said, and sighed. “Look, we’ll be coming up on Hastur soon. In three hours, we’ll be on my side of the mountains, and three hours after that, we’ll be in Brookings, where Kate lives. She can drive us in her car and I’ll sleep then, okay?”

He didn’t look convinced, but he gave her a conciliatory chirr. It never reached his eyes. He was worried about her, and you couldn’t get mad at a fella for that, could you? She did look exhausted; she glanced at herself in the rearview and wanted to cringe. All black circles and bloodshot eyes over fading bruises. She looked like Kate rolling in through the door after an all-nighter with that biker jackass she’d dated a few years back, whatsisname. Bricksteak or Boomerang or some damn thing beginning with B. She looked awful.

Sarah turned the a/c up and adjusted the vents so it hit her square in the eyes. Kate. Maybe even by noon, Kate. Now that the end was in sight, the sister-sized void in her life had become overwhelming. There’d be some I-told-you-so’s and she was ready to take it on the chin, but she knew once her sister met Sanford, she’d want to help and not just because they were family. Kate would help because it was the right thing to do and even more importantly, Kate would be better at it than Sarah was. It was almost over. Maybe not by noon, but today for sure. Kate. She could see the four of them around the dingy kitchen table (they only had two chairs, so Sanford was standing and T’aki was mostly pushing his ship back and forth along the edge) talking everything out and between Kate and Sanford, there would finally be a plan. Kate always knew what she was doing and how to get it done.

Sarah rubbed at her eyes before they could tear up. She was too tired and it was making her too emotional. There wouldn’t be time to sit around the table and talk anyway. They wouldn’t even have time for her to catch a shower, which she desperately needed, but maybe she could grab some clean clothes out of Kate’s closet. She could shower at the next motel, if there was one. On the other hand, if they drove straight through the night again, they’d be in Salina on Tuesday, even if they took the back roads. Instead of getting a motel and a shower, they could be renting a boat. She’d never been on a boat before, not a real one, out on the ocean. She hoped she didn’t get seasick. There was nothing quite so discouraging as seeing your fearless rescuer yarking over the side on every wave…

Did you need a special license to pilot a boat? Were they going to ask to see it? Ugh, don’t think about it. Just get there and deal with whatever comes up. If they had to steal the boat, so be it. She’d already beaten up a security guard and abetted whatever Samaritan had done for a distraction that night in Cottonwood, and she knew she’d have to help hijack the shuttle or whatever IBI was using to get up to the ship. She was already, in no uncertain terms, a terrorist. Stealing a boat was pretty small potatoes in comparison. And maybe it wouldn’t even come to that. How easy it was to picture her infinitely more competent big sister as a member of some secret underground alien-rights resistance movement. Maybe the end of the Great Escape would come as just a few phone calls, a secret meeting, and a quick helicopter ride straight up to the ship.

It was a happy thought, but it was also complete crap and Sarah knew it. Kate wasn’t a mercenary, although she was about to become a criminal, thanks to her little sister. A refugee. A buggie.

‘But not for long,’ Sarah thought suddenly, in an inner voice so clear that she nearly turned her head to see who said it. ‘Because once you get up to the ship, you won’t be coming back down.’

The moment of wondering horror with which the rest of her brain processed this perfectly obvious piece of information lasted until the van sailed right past the posted sign and over a set of railroad tracks at full speed, bouncing her head off the van’s ceiling and the rear tires right off the road.

“Sorry,” she said at once, mostly to T’aki, who was trying to get out of his seatbelt and into his father’s lap. “Sorry, that was my fault. You okay, jellybean?”

“Don’t do that!” T’aki wailed, slapping at Sanford’s arm as his father attempted to calm him down. “That’s not funny!”

She agreed it wasn’t and solemnly promised not to do it again, all the while thinking of the ship. How was it possible that she could plan to put Sanford on the ship and send him home, that she could even dream of herself as a part of the happy ending, and yet somehow never connect the two? Even now, when she could clearly see a hundred different scenarios leading up to the ship (not all of them ending well), she still could not quite see what came after, when Sanford was home on yang’Tak and she was the alien.

And where did that leave Kate? Because she could no more see a future without her sister than she could see one without Sanford. She already knew that she would try to insist that Kate stay behind when they rented that boat, just like she knew that Kate would refuse. She could hear it now: ‘We’re family, aren’t we? You’re all I’ve got.’

Of course, she didn’t think she could be one hundred percent forthcoming about the exact nature of her relationship with Sanford, not at the start, but there was time to work it casually into the conversation on the drive to California. Sarah had tolerated all of Kate’s stormy romances, the least she could do was reciprocate once. Besides, apart from the whole alien-thing, Sanford was the ideal man—strong, sensitive, a caring father, plus he could program the coffee maker. What more could a girl ask for? Okay, skin would be nice, but it didn’t pay to be too picky.

Smiling, Sarah looked into the rearview mirror for a soul-shoring glimpse of her man, something positive to keep in mind when she made that first uncertain introduction.

Her heart slammed into her ribs.

Kate sat beside Sanford in the back seat, looking out the window.

Her hair was down, tousled as with sleep. She wore the Bud Bowl V tee she used as a nightgown, pulled demurely down to her knees, and her feet were bare. As Sarah stared, Kate turned her head and met her eyes in the mirror. She smiled, Kate’s same old smile, tired and a bit distracted, but still glad to see her.

“Sarah!”

Her eyes snapped forward right about the time the logging truck whose lane she was slowly invading blasted his horn. She pulled right, veered onto the shoulder, and stomped the brakes flat.

Two aliens hit the auto-lock on their seat belts with twin rattle-cough cries of alarm. Sanford grabbed the gun before it could get away from him, but T’aki’s spaceship went on its maiden unassisted flight, banging high in the back of Sarah’s seat before clattering to the floor in two pieces. The van fishtailed wildly once, slightly twice, and came to a stop.

Sarah stared into the mirror, her heart pounding back into rhythm. Sanford, T’aki, no Kate. She slumped in her seat, both hands over her face, just breathing.

Seatbelts clicking. Sanford’s hands on her shoulders, squeezing her too tight. That was really the only problem with him; he never knew how hard he was squeezing her. “Are you all right?”

“Get back. Someone will see you.” She tried the mirror again. It stayed empty. “I’m fine. You were right. I need to stop. Next place I see, I promise.”

He didn’t seem to want to let go of her. She had to rub his joints for two or three minutes, making assurances, before he finally retreated to the safety of the back seat and its tinted windows. He gave T’aki his ship, after finding and snapping the wing back on, and the two of them sat very quietly and watched Sarah collect herself.

Too tired. Think of Kate, see Kate. Just that simple. If she’d been thinking of stopping for burgers, she’d have seen Mayor McCheese.

She looked in the mirror one more time, saw her man and his son, and smiled at them. Then she pulled out carefully onto the road.

There were no motels in Hastur, but there were two bed-and-breakfasts and three campgrounds. One of the campgrounds had cabins; it made her feel a little dizzy when she pulled up to the office, like time itself had wound back and she was just starting out again, two thousand miles reset and Cottonwood right behind her. God, she really was tired, wasn’t she?

The cabins were almost twice as expensive here, with none of the niceties. No café, no gift shop, only a couple of vending machines and a stack of brochures advertising rafting tours and hiking trails. She bought a couple bags of potato chips, since they’d gone over so well at the block party, two bottles of water, and a Dr. Pepper for herself. She didn’t want it, but she thought she ought to drink something. Her stomach was feeling a little flippy at the moment.

The cabin was every bit as private as the manager had assured her it would be, and much smaller than she expected—just a one-room kitchen/dining/living area, a half-bath, and a tiny bedroom—but the view was nice. Once the coast was clear and she waved them in, T’aki ran immediately to the back door and pressed himself against the sliding glass, gasping, “Father! Is it the ocean?”

Sarah let him look awhile before gently drawing the curtain. “No, honey, it’s just a river. But don’t go out there, okay? Lots of humans like to go out on the water when it’s hot like this and you might be seen.”

“Stay inside,” Sanford amplified, picking up his son to carry back to the tired couch in the front of the cabin. He pulled the decorative afghan off the back of the cushions to wrap T’aki in and then set him firmly down. “Away from windows.”

“Can’t I see the water? Please!”

“No.” Sanford softened his command with some shared breath and rubbed the boy’s throat gently. “We have to be careful now. All of us. And don’t jump on things here. You might break something.”

“Like what?” T’aki challenged, bouncing in his nest.

“Like your stubborn shell of a head.” Sanford gave the top of it a tap, then picked up the remote and turned the television on.

Sarah set their snacks down on the sofa as Sanford re-wrapped the afghan around his giggling son. She could have watched some TV with them, and a part of her did want to, if only to help her wind down a little, but the couch, like everything else here, was too small. She slipped away instead, thinking maybe it was best to give them a little privacy; they surely weren’t so used to spending every passing moment in someone else’s company, particularly a human’s. She wouldn’t be the best company right now anyway.

There was no phone, only an empty jack in one wall to mark the place one used to be, years and years ago. Who needed a land-line these days, when everyone had their own paz? No phone, and the need to call Kate and replace that awful hallucination in the mirror with something real was eating her up inside. Sarah stood staring at that jack, trying to think her way back down that road to the first place she might feasibly find another junker-phone, knowing already that she wouldn’t do it. Sanford wouldn’t let her even if she tried. And she didn’t need to, that was the thing she had to keep remembering. She didn’t need to, because Kate was fine. Heck, even if she did call, at this time of day, Kate would be at work and all she’d get would be the voice mail of her paz. Sarah would probably be pulling into her sister’s driveway before Kate got around to answering her messages.

Yeah, all of that.

The empty jack stared her down. Who the hell rented out vacation cabins and didn’t install friggin’ phones?

Sarah went to the bedroom (another empty jack, under the nightstand by the bed). She stepped out of her shoes, kicked them out of the way, started to undress and then gave up and walked half-naked over to the picturesque, if tiny, window. She propped her elbow up on the sill, propped her chin up on her elbow, and snapped the top off her soda.

‘I’d know if something were wrong, wouldn’t I?’ she thought, and waited, but no answer came to her out of the ether, neither a comforting glow to settle her mind nor an ominous weight in the pit of her newly-mended stomach. Just silence, uncertainty, and another six hours on the road ahead of her.

She hadn’t been there long, drinking her Dr. Pepper and watching the river flow by, when Sanford quietly joined her. She didn’t hear him at all, but she saw his reflection swim into focus in the glass until he was standing right beside her. He let her look for a while, then drew the curtain, just as she had done to T’aki. When she turned, protesting, he took away her soda, set it on the sill and picked her up.

She’d never been picked up before, unless she counted Samaritan snatching her off the causeway, and she was unprepared for how easily he did it. Although taller than she, Sanford’s alien body was much more narrowly-built, and his arms were actually slimmer than her own, if longer. She clutched at his neck reflexively, and he drummed his palps on her breastbone as he carried her to the bed and lay her down. He leaned over her, his face close and huge above her, and said, “Are you tired?”

She should have giggled, he was making such an obvious effort to win a laugh out of her. Instead, she reached up and stroked the smooth side of his armored head, even knowing he couldn’t feel it. “You amaze me,” she said.

The playful light in his eyes dimmed. He clicked softly, then chirred.

“I liked you even the first day I met you. And I trusted you. And now I love you.” She blushed, hearing that. Who says that to a man they’ve known only a few months, slept with only twice? “I don’t think it’s just the danger talking, either. I feel so safe when I’m with you, like this isn’t running, like nothing is wrong. I love you, Sanford.”

His eyes changed again, she couldn’t say just how. “You are my breath and blood,” he said, speaking in a strange, almost stilted tone utterly unlike him. His hand stroked up over her chest to caress her throat. “I am your air, your heart. I drink water from your hands. You bare your back to me.” He spoke softer now, but with growing intensity, the words vibrating from his chest-plate to her breast. “Your voice is the secret sounding of my name. I give my unprotected skin to your touch. I am always in you. You are always with me.”

Oddly, none of that seemed like too much for a few months and two nights. She put her arms around him as he climbed onto the bed and lay tensely atop her, looking down. Their hands met and twined briefly; she found the seams along his shoulders to stroke, and he combed his long fingers through her hair. That was all for several silent minutes.

“I must copulate with you now,” he said.

Sarah giggled, blushing right to her bones, and then felt the press of his belly-plates swelling against her stomach. Not all the way apart, not yet, but there was a real urgency in his eyes. She touched his shoulder-joints again and he chirred raggedly, brushing his feathery claspers against her.

“Do I hurt you when we copulate this way?” he asked.

She bit her lip, avoided the question. “I like to see your face.”

“Yes,” he said, relaxing. His belly-plates pushed at her again. He shifted back; she felt the solid pressure of his curved member pressing on her next, insistent and unfeeling as it dug at her soft thigh. Still, he hesitated.

She started to wriggle out of the rest of her clothes. He stopped her.

“Do I…” Awkward again, he moved his hand back to her breast and lightly rubbed up and down. “Do I give you sexual pleasure?”

“I can’t believe you have to ask that. More than I ever thought possible with anyone.” She faltered, her smile fading. “Do I?”

“Even when we do not touch,” he assured her, and pulled the sheet up over their heads.

After that, there were very few words, apart from, “Ow ow ow! Watch the spikes! Watch the—okay, okay, that’s good…oh, that’s so good…” and soft laughter, chirrs, sighs, humming, and finally, sleep.

* * *

Sanford was awakened too early by the weight of a small body bouncing off the foot of the bed. He sat up fast and that same small body smacked loudly into his chest-plate, knocking him flat again.

“I heard a noise,” T’aki said, burrowing violently under the sheets.

Then Sanford heard it and how he could have heard it once and slept through it could not be fathomed, for it was a bellow like nothing he had ever heard. Like an angry human, a roll of thunder, and truck’s horn all at once, it raised the hairs over his ear.

“What the hell is that?” Sarah asked sleepily, pushing herself onto her elbows.

“It’s right outside,” shivered T’aki.

Sanford got up with his son’s hands pulling at him. He went very cautiously to the window, twitched aside one finger’s breadth of curtain and risked a glance from behind the wall.

Among the trees of the forest, midway between the water and this building, stood a monstrous creature. Taller than a cow and built for battle, with great shovel-shaped horns edged in points, it swung its head among the low branches, then arched its neck and roared again.

“Oh wow,” breathed Sarah, staring boldly from her side of the window. She was smiling.

“Is it dangerous?”

“Not to us in here.”

“Is it a dog?” T’aki asked from under the sheet.

“No, honey. It’s called a moose. I’ve never seen one in person before,” she added, moving even closer to the glass. “So to speak.”

The monster raked its horns over a tree trunk and roared a third time.

“Why is it doing that?” T’aki wailed.

“He’s trying to attract a mate,” said Sarah.

Sanford touched her arm, wanting her away from the glass and out of sight, should the creature look around.

She smiled at him. “Relax, I’m off the market.” But she came away from the window. Not to return to bed, he saw, but to finish dressing.

He looked out the window again and saw the sun only just past its heights. He scraped his palps disapprovingly.

“I know, I know. But I feel better, I do. I just…need to get there, Sanford. It’s like an itch—er, like a…like a…” She gave up and turned to him, half-dressed and crookedly smiling. “You can put me in that bed, but I promise you I won’t sleep.”

Did she think that was a threat? He chirred and fanned his palps, then chuckled to see her cheeks turn a brilliant pink.

In that selfsame bed, T’aki giggled.

“I want to go,” she said, coming to touch him. “Please. I want to get there. I want to see Kate and get out of that big, clunky, obvious van. I want to get to California. You could be on your ship tomorrow. I need to see you safe, Sanford. Bed is wonderful…but I need to see you safe.”

She offered her breath to him, imploring. His heart throbbing, he took it, gave back his own, and wished she would go back to sleep. He could taste the exhaustion in her now, taste it even through her pleasures when he mated with her. But she was adamant, he saw, and with the sister out of her reach, he could understand why. He released her to dig T’aki out of the sheets. “We’re leaving,” he said. “Get your toy.”

“What about the dog-moose?”

“He won’t bother us from the backyard,” Sarah said, stepping into her shoes. “We’re going straight out to the van, okay? When I wave, you just do your thing, jellybean, and come bouncing out.”

T’aki bounced on the bed to practice, clutching at Sanford’s arm. Sarah rubbed his head, stroked Sanford’s shoulder-joint, and went into the bathroom.

T’aki continued to bounce once or twice more, then stopped. He watched the bathroom door, antennae twitching, then whispered, “Will Kate come too?”

“Kate is Sarah,” said Sanford. “Sarah is Kate.”

“What if she doesn’t like us?”

“Sarah is certain she will, so I think so too. We will be a family.” He gave his son a pat. “She can be on my ti’yan’ team.”

One bounce. Two.

“Will Sarah have the egg soon?”

Sanford glanced down at him, clicking amusement. “No. Sarah is not making an egg.”

T’aki stared at him, openly baffled. “But I thought that’s where eggs came from. You said—”

“It’s complicated.”

The bathroom door opened.

“We’ll discuss this another day,” Sanford concluded. “It is a long way back to yang’Tak. We will have a great deal of time to talk.”

“But—”

“Go on then.” Sanford plucked him off the bed and set him down. “We’re leaving soon. Go.”

“I hate the toilet!” T’aki grumped, stomping across the bedroom.

“Then use the bathtub, but rinse, don’t leave a mess.”

“Ew,” said Sarah, and when he glanced at her, she added, “Um, that looked like a serious talk.”

“Everything is serious to a second-molt. Come here, please.”

She came, her head at curiosity’s angle. “Why?”

“Because it will be a long drive and I want to touch you.” He did, and felt her fingers on his receptors in return, but her mind was elsewhere. “You are so nervous,” he observed. “Don’t I make you feel safe?”

“Yes, you do, but I can’t afford to trust that feeling until you’re safe on the ship.” She laughed shortly. “I really am a rotten soldier.”

“You don’t have to be a better one. Once this is over, you will never need to be a soldier again.” He clicked for humor. “I may give it up myself.”

“Oh? And what will you be?”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead, but I find myself inspired by caseworking.”

“I think you could make more money as a TV repairman.”

“A point.”

“I thought you said we were leaving,” T’aki inserted, not without a heavy sigh. He had his clothes on now and his ship in hand, the very picture of a patient boy.

“We are, honey,” said Sarah, disengaging his embrace. “Right now, even. And we don’t stop again until Brookings.”

“And Kate!” cried T’aki, and ran out with her.

‘A family,’ thought Sanford, and followed after.

* * *

But they did, in fact, make several stops between the sleeping place and Sarah’s sister—once for food (good salty meat in bread with something she called cheese. He thought it very like ‘burgers’, but she called it something else, a ‘micmuffin’. Hers had an egg in it; he refrained from comment, but T’aki squealed out a “Gross!” before he could stop him), and three times for fuel. All in all, it was coming on dark when she began to sing and he knew they must nearly be there.

Darkness was a much better time to come up on the house, he thought, eyeing all the others that stood nearby. She’d been eager enough to keep traveling this morning, but had they arrived in full daylight, he was certain they would have been seen. She would have been certain of it as well, had she not been so tired. And she was still so tired. His brave, determined Sarah.

As it was, the yard was barren of covering trees or fences, the streets were wide and clear, and there were signs of life at every window on the street. Humans everywhere, humans surrounding them, but in the home of Kate, only a single light burning. It was the darkest in all the street, made dark deliberately, perhaps, in welcome.

“Ah crap, she’s loaded up the car,” Sarah said, parking. “Okay, um…I want you two to stay here while I go in and get her. Then we’ll move stuff into the trunk and get some blankets for you two—”

“I have to pee,” T’aki said.

“What, again?”

Stung, the boy retorted, “I only went this morning! You get to go all day!”

“I don’t go all day, I just—” She stopped there, wise woman, and sighed. She looked at the house. “Okay, um…gosh, that’s a long run. Okay, let me move the van…she’s going to love me parking on the lawn…and you make it quick, T’aki! Lord, she’s going to have a shock.”

“You haven’t told her about us, have you?” Sanford asked, amused.

“No.” She navigated onto the soft soil of the yard and eased forward until her wheels bogged. It brought them much closer to the door and yes, made a ruin of the yard. “It didn’t feel right saying it over the phone. I’m just not sure that springing it on her like this is the right thing to do. You know…‘Surprise, aliens!’ You don’t do that in someone’s house, Sanford.”

“Only in their car.”

She looked at the smaller vehicle in a startled way, then laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that. Oh well, at least she can’t crash the house if she freaks out. Let me go first, T’aki. The door might be locked.”

She went, turning in a full circle as she climbed the few stairs to the dwelling’s door. She knocked, then opened it, and Sanford heard her call the sister’s name. Then she stuck her head back out and waved to them.

“All right, quickly now, and remember this is not our home. Be polite.” Sanford checked the street, found it empty, and followed his son inside at a run. He left his only weapon behind him in the van. He did this not thoughtlessly, by accident, but with the deliberate thought that this may well be Sarah’s sister and someone to trust, but she would begin as a stranger to them and it would be best not to invade her home as an armed and deadly bug.

He had the best intentions.

“—so about that surprise I mentioned,” Sarah was saying, apparently to an empty room. “I need you to keep an extremely open mind here and—the bathroom’s straight at the end of the hall, T’aki, use the toilet if you love me—and just don’t get crazy until you hear us out.”

“Just a sec!” a woman’s voice called.

“Okay, whatever.” Sarah pulled a chair around and sat. “It’s not like we’re in a hurry or anything.”

“Father?” T’aki stopped short in the hallway, his small claspers fluttering. He backed up. “Father, something smells bad.”

Tactless boy…but when T’aki turned and ran back to him, Sanford flashed his own claspers, sniffing as he stepped protectively forward.

Blood.

So much blood.

“Sarah, back!” he shouted, snatching up his son, but he tore open the door on three soldiers, their guns already aimed. Two more raised themselves up from behind the kitchen counters. The last came from a room at the end of the hall, and this one, Sanford recognized.

“You stood me up, you bitch,” said Piotr Lantz. And smiled.

Sarah bolted up from her chair, but Piotr was across the room and right in front of her in the same instant to slap her to the ground before she ever had a chance to run. Grinning, he seized a fisthold in her hair and pulled her to her feet, slapping her playfully until she stopped struggling and only hung in his grip. Then he dipped into his jacket pocket and came out with what the humans called a paz, their all-purpose handheld communications device. He tapped the screen. “Just a sec!” called the woman’s voice. He laughed and tucked it away. “I got that on the first day,” he said, tossing Sarah to one of his men for binding. “Took about an hour before I got the tone I liked. Distracted, you know, but not scared or hurt at all…not like she’s missing any fingers.”

“What have you done?” Sarah whispered. Her face was white and glassy with fear. She resisted nothing, scarcely seemed aware of her body, only of the man before her. “Where is she?”

“But you, now. You really got one over on me.” Piotr approached, looking Sanford up and down through narrow eyes. “The worst I ever thought you took out of Cottonwood was maybe some pictures. The old man’s going to shit a brick when he sees this, and I…I kind of want to see that. Take the kid.”

“You’ll never!” Sanford shouted, lashing out a foot at the first man who moved. He struck the armored vest, but sent the human into a wall violently enough to knock a hole half-through it.

“Give him up, Dad, or I’ll shoot him right out of your arms.” Piotr aimed his own weapon coolly—a Flamespitter, with chemical-laced bullets that pierced the chitin and set fires in yang’ti blood. He bared his human teeth in a grin. “Give him up. My orders are to take you alive and I guess that means all of you, but only until you give me shit. Give him up.”

T’aki’s fingers dug in around Sanford’s chest-plate. He could feel the pounding of the little heart against his shell, drumming harmony with his own. “Father, no! Father, please! Make them let me stay with you! Make them!”

“You got to the count of three and then I take him anyway and I pop his eyes out. One. Two.”

Sanford clutched T’aki’s head under his hand, breathed once, despairingly, and held him out.

“Good choice,” Piotr said, as Sanford watched his son be dangled upside-down, his feet bound together and tethered. Struggling, terrified, the boy’s muscles spasmed and vented a spray of fear-bright piss to run down into his own face. He started squalling, as much from shame as anything, and all the soldiers laughed. “All right, all right, take the little shit outside before it ruins the carpet. We’re guests in this house, boys.”

All laughed again. Sarah shook.

“Now you, Dad, and remember: If you fight, we kill the kid. We’ll bring him right back in here and stomp him flat in front of you.”

“You bastard!” Sarah shouted, and was at once restrained by soldiers. She surged against their pull regardless, fighting forward as if there were anything at all she could do if she reached him. “Stomp on a three year-old? You sick son of a bitch!”

Piotr slapped her without looking at her. When he saw Sanford flinch, his head cocked. He grinned, pulled Sarah up by the hair and punched her. This time, Sanford kept still. The human lost interest, dropped his victim and gave a nod to his men.

Sanford was forced to his knees, his ankles bound to a hobbling-stick, and his wrists shackled behind him. He did not resist.

“We’ve got a long ride ahead of us,” Piotr said, strolling over to pick up T’aki’s spaceship where the boy had dropped it. He opened the pilot’s pit, chuckled, and snapped it shut. “Want to say goodbye to your sister before we go?”

The hope in Sarah’s eyes was awful to see—born crippled and quick to die. Blood ran down her cheeks like tears. “You…You’re lying.”

“She’s in back, lying down. Boys, take our pretty Pollyanna back to see her sister.” And he laughed, but as Sarah was dragged into the hallway, his laughter stopped. He came to stand with Sanford, tossing the toy from hand to hand, studying him with a thoughtful expression. “You’re a long, long way from home, bug. And you’re a damned funny thing for her to bring to meet the family.”

The cry that rose from the rear of the house lacked the surprise necessary to be a scream. It swelled and hung, a ghastly sound of grief and horror and awful knowing that had no words, not even the sister’s name. Then weeping, broken weeping.

“Sir?” One of the soldiers came to the door. In one hand, he held Sanford’s Annihilator. In the other, the one thing it had all been for.

“Well, shut my mouth.” Piotr took the gun and dropped the Fortesque Freeship. The wing broke off again. He kicked the toy indifferently away, turning the weapon over in his hands. “I think I’m getting the picture. Forget bricks, the old man is going to shit kittens. What did she promise you, bug? Better food? Clean water? Were the two of you going to start the revolution that meant freedom for all your bug friends? Huh? And what is this?” He took the code-bank, laughed, and handed both items back. “Make sure that’s everything and load it up. I need to call van Meyer. Somehow I don’t think we’re headed back to Cottonwood just yet.”

He walked away, pausing to pat Sarah’s cheek as she was pulled into the room, and another soldier stepped up. He raised his weapon, brought it down hard on Sanford’s neck, and darkness took him. Darkness and the sound of tears.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was a long drive and a quiet one. The soldiers talked some, laughed some, but even they seemed tired, their adrenaline spent, anxious now to be done with it. They left the rain in the north and drove through the night into the sunrise of a clear day. They stopped only once, to transfer from the van to a helicopter, and their journey continued out over the water. With the sun up, Sanford could see the ocean, Earth’s ocean, just as he remembered it. And he could see Sarah’s face, Sarah’s eyes, staring hollowly into nothing.

From the pilot’s pit, Piotr watched them in smirking silence. At length, he rose and came into the hold. He sat on the bench beside Sanford, close enough to press his thigh to Sanford’s thigh, his arm to Sanford’s arm, but it was Sarah he was grinning at, Sarah he wanted to see.

“They say the best a man can ever get is tight virgin pussy,” he said, as Sarah watched the tide swell and break below her. “But they never had a good gut-stab. Hot, squirming, bucking, writhing…and the sounds they make! Like rabbits in a snare.”

Sarah ignored him, lost in her thoughts.

“Your sister lived four hours after the first cut. I had her five times.” He raised a hand, fingers splayed, waited, and then reached across and grabbed Sarah’s chin. He forced her to look at him, and grinned again. “I’m hoping you and I can break those records.”

“My sister wasn’t with you at the end,” Sarah said. Her voice was steady, calm, like her eyes. “She was with me. I won’t be with you either.”

Piotr laughed, contemptuous but puzzled. He let her go. “Van Meyer has a few questions for you, little girl. He may even let me ask them. When he’s heard what you have to say, you’re mine and we finally get to have our date. Now you might not think that’s much incentive, but then, you just remember your little bug friends here. The harder you make it for us, the harder we can make it for them.”

Sarah’s eyes met Sanford’s in a touch he could almost feel, as if his whole body were like hers, receptive and alive. In that shared silence, he told her there was no one life, no two, equal to all those that would be devastated by the secrets she held. ‘No matter what they do,’ he thought, and he saw that she understood.

“Let’s practice, shall we?” Piotr pulled out a small gun and pushed it tight against Sanford’s head. He thumbed the hammer-switch back, held up the code-bank. “What is this? Where did you get it? How did you get it out of the lab without anyone seeing you?”

Sarah said nothing.

“I’m going to blow his brains out, beautiful. Then I’m going to bring the little one up and sit him in those brains and ask you again.”

Sarah’s eyes made water. She said nothing.

Piotr shook his head and looked at him as though he were a friend, still with the gun to his head. “See how much she cares, bug?”

“Yes,” said Sanford softly.

Piotr holstered his weapon. “You think about it, little girl. You think hard. Because you want to die with my cock in your guts, believe me. That way is just a few hours. Other ways I know take weeks.” He leaned out to look through the pilot’s window as the vehicle began to descend, then grinned again. “Almost home now. You thinking yet, Pollyanna?”

“I’m thinking,” she said. “I’m afraid my answer is still fuck you. That’s not very original,” she added, her weariness adding a note of sincerity to the apology. “But it’s all you deserve and, frankly, probably all you’d understand because you have shit for brains.”

One of the soldiers up front turned around and looked at them, whispered, smothered a laugh.

Piotr gazed at her, nodding a little, not quite smiling. “You’re damned lucky I have the orders I do,” he said. “But you remember those words, beautiful, because I am going to make you eat them.” He got up, moving back into the pilot’s pit, and left them alone.

Sanford looked at her, his Sarah, and watched her make her silent tears. There were things he wanted to tell her—that it wasn’t her fault, that he regretted none of it, that she was in him as deep as T’aki and his own father and that would never change—but these were not things to share with the soldiers of IBI. He said none of them and only hoped she heard them anyway.

The floating city was below them now—perhaps the same one where Sanford had been taken on his first day a prisoner, perhaps not. He could see humans on the deck, waving them into position as the helicopter came down. When he looked up, through the blur of the spinning propellers that were this vehicle’s crude means of flight, he could see part of the ship. The hatchway was still open, but it seemed to be intact. He wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or not, to know that they had come this close and it might have all worked out. Maybe it would have been best if he’d seen the hull torn open and scaffolding built up around the areas the humans had dismantled—if there had been no hope after all, in other words—because, damn him, it still did not feel over.

The helicopter bumped onto the deck. The propellers whined themselves to a stop. The pilots unfastened their harnesses and the soldiers readied their weapons. Sarah wiped her face on her shoulders and straightened her back. He clicked at her softly. She made herself smile at him.

The side door opened. The briny-rot stink of the sea struck him, just as he remembered it. Piotr showed his gun and waved them out. They went, docile as livestock in slaughter-pens, and stood before the man Sanford guessed to be their true leader.

“Miss Fowler,” the leader said at last, and it was a voice Sanford knew: the dark voice from the telephone, the man to whom Sarah had made her apologies on the night of the feast, the man who had perhaps ordered her crippling. “Welcome to my headquarters. My home, I might say, although I do not spend so much time here as I would like. So much to do, nee? So much requiring me to oversee. But home is where the heart is, ja? Mine is here. I like to call it Camp Zero. You see?” He spread his arms, indicating the vastness of the floating city on every side of him, all of it lying in the shadow of the ship overhead. The dark man smiled. “There is nothing here.”

The humans brought T’aki out on a tether, dragging him over the ground by his feet, and dropped him struggling and squalling into a kennel. They took it away, T’aki’s cries echoing and receding until he could not hear them anymore. His son.

The dark man watched him the entire time. Not his men. Not Sarah. Not T’aki in his kennel, but only Sanford. When the deck was quiet once more, he turned his attention back to Sarah.

“I don’t know whether to be disappointed in you, nee, or impressed. You have surprised me, Miss Fowler. Surprise. Not in thirty years or more does this happen.”

Sarah did not respond.

The dark man came forward to look at Sanford. His human eyes were clear and cold; his face, deeply creased and weathered, impervious to the age that sat on it.

“Where are you thinking to take the bug, I wonder? Who are you thinking to play show and tell? To your sister, eh? To mailroom slut? I thought you smarter than that.” He glanced to see what effect his words had, but Sarah just stared into empty air, lightly shaking. The dark man returned his gaze to Sanford, pensive. “What is it you think he know? Why this bug, of all of them?”

‘Come a little closer,’ thought Sanford, and flexed his toes on the hard concrete floor. The hobbles on his legs prevented a lethal kick, but he could still bite. His barbed throat palps could catch and hold that leathery skin; one good yank would have the head clean away and the body dropping lifeless to the ground. ‘Lean in to mock me, dark man. I will kill you if I can kill no one else.’

The dark man remained just beyond the threshold of his reach. “Little one is your child, nee?” he asked, boring that stare now into Sanford. “You know where we take him? To one-by-one meter box. Air through holes. Protein drink through tube, cold and bitter. Pipes under vents in bottom of box to take away waste. No light. No voice. No touch. He will be the first we so experiment upon. I really don’t know what it do to him.”

Sanford spat chaw. One of the soldiers slammed a gun into his back. Another picked him up again, black chaw dripping down his chest-plate.

“You wish him to come to your cell instead?” the dark man continued. He held out his hand, was given the code-bank, and held it up. “Tell me what this is. Tell me what it does, and I give to you your son once a week, three hours, for the rest of your life. Ah, but show me what it does, show me, bug, and he lives with you in that cell forever. Never take away again.”

Sanford said nothing, did nothing, thought only, ‘Come a little closer, human.’

“Nee? Perhaps you.” The dark man moved on to Sarah, not hesitating to stand close to her. He ran his fingers along her cheeks, tenderly cleaning them of helpless tears. “From the beginning, I see that you care too much. Ah well. In the village where I am born, was born also an idiot-boy. Sweet as sunrise, kind to all. He keep scorpions and beetles for pets. He loves everything, nee? When we wish to hurt him, we have only to kill his beetles, his scorpions. We crush them, and oh, how he cry.” He glanced back at Sanford, his gaze incurious, wanting only for Sarah to see him looking. “Will you cry, Miss Fowler, when you think of little bug in his box calling out for Father, Father? Will you cry when you think of this bug in his cell, never to see his son? What will you do to give them three hours together every week, eh?”

He raised the code-bank. Sarah looked at it, trembling.

“You steal this from me,” the dark man said quietly. “But I will forgive you if you only tell me how. You may think I cannot forgive, but I can. Even you, dear child. What does it do? How many guns did you take and give to bug in Cottonwood? Tell me. You will never be free again, but your life can still be easy…or very, very hard.”

She did not answer.

The dark man stepped back and nodded. Piotr came in at once and drove the butt of his gun playfully into her belly. Sarah doubled over, coughing.

The two humans exchanged sudden startled glances.

The dark man caught Sarah by her shoulder and pushed her upright. He took her shirt and pulled it roughly up, out of the waist of her pants.

The two men stared together at her smooth and unmarked stomach.

“Miss Fowler,” the leader said after a long moment. “You surprise me again.”

“What the fuck!”

“Ja, ja.” The dark man glanced at the code-bank, turning it over in his hands, introspective. “I think we go inside now. I feel we have much more to discuss.”

Sanford saw no choice but to walk.

Through the same doors where they had taken T’aki, into a narrow hall, then to a lift and down, below the decks and into the heart of the floating city. The corridors here were grey and sterile; the men who occupied them, much the same. It reminded him unpleasantly of the hospital place where they had kept Sarah, a place not of healing but of experimentation, only here, appearances did not deceive. They showed no surprise to see him, but all gave Sarah curious looks, as if they had never imagined a human presence in this place…but were intrigued by the possibilities.

The dark man brought them to armored doors, which opened at a swipe from his plastic card. He beckoned them in behind him, into a vast room with bright lights—a technician’s bay of some sort, with metal-and-glass display cases occupying much of the center space. The rest of the room was used as a storehouse filled with crates, each one meticulously labeled, some with pictures fastened to better display the contents for which they had no real human word: yang’ti weapons, yang’ti computer consoles, yang’ti food dispensers and water recycler parts. Every piece stripped away from the cargo hold of the ship was here, or seemed to be, useless to humans but hoarded all the same. What they could not make work, they had packed away; what they could not bring themselves to pack, they had broken open for study at their primitive work stations.

Sarah saw it before he did. His gaze still wandered over the broken yang’ti machinery, idly identifying this or that useless device and mentally fitting them together again, when she gasped. He looked and uttered a sharp skree of sheer surprise.

At the end of this room, behind a window, in another little cell all its own, was an escape pod. How they’d raised it, brought it here—how they’d fit it in that room, by Ko’vi!—all beyond his imagining. It stood there, its surface scored by unknown equipment, but still sound, almost seeming to look back at him. The dark eyes of its windows were clean and ready, unblinking. ‘Take me home,’ it seemed to say.

The dark man set the code-bank on a technician’s table. It sat on its side, a black circle on a shiny metal surface, with the pod framed behind it. Were it not for the glass, the humans, the hobbles, Sanford could have put a hand on each of them at the same time.

“I see you admire my collection,” the dark man said. “And this, my crown jewel. We find twelve so far. Some, we dismantle, try to fit together again. Some, we cut into, to study like the carcass of bug. This one, I keep whole. I like to look at it.”

And he did, gazing reflexively into the glass, his hands clasped behind his back in stately imitation of Sanford and Sarah in their binders. “So far, we cannot copy design. But we are closer than we were, nee?” He smiled at Sanford, a cold and calculating smile. “Soon, your secrets will no more elude us, and we shall make our own. Just think of it. It withstands even the pressures at the ocean’s floor, yet is capable of flight in our atmosphere, perhaps even of flight through space. It is invulnerable to all bullets, to most missiles, to all temperature changes. This is my war machine and I am five years, they say, perhaps only three, from achieving it.”

Now he looked at Sarah and found her already staring back at him in horror.

“But, another day, nee?” The dark man gave the code-bank a pat and left it there, turning towards his captives with a smile. “I wanted you to see my treasures, while you think about your little one in his lonely box. There is much you could do to help me, bug. Many hours to hold your small son, good food and clean water to give him, even television, comfortable bed, books to read. This can be Hell…but it doesn’t have to be.”

“I will never help you,” Sanford said simply.

“Nee? Perhaps not.” The dark man smiled at him, frustratingly out of range. “But perhaps boy will. Ja, I think boy will, when he has time in his box to do nothing, think of nothing, imagine nothing but what we do to you. You see the beauty of this, Miss Fowler? You bring me the perfect tools, each one to use against the other.”

“My child knows nothing that can help you.”

The dark man shrugged with his eyebrows and turned away. “If he is of no use to me, there are others who can use him. Even a bug who knows nothing can answer many questions. How much cold can the bug withstand before he freezes solid, hm? How many times can we sever limb before it do not grow back in molt? Can it grow back eyes?”

“You’re a monster!” Sarah spat.

The dark man smiled benignly. “Who was it I once heard say…Carnivores win wars. Ha. I do so much like that one. Come.”

He led them back into the hall and onward, past many doors and finally into a long room with white walls that stank of death.

Because it was death.

Yang’ti hung from hooks over metal tables where humans worked to pull their chitin away, catch up their decaying blood, separate out their organs. Yang’ti arms on trays, finger-plates peeled back to expose their receptor-pads, tiny needles touching carefully-mapped nerves and tendons. Yang’ti heads, mounted in a ghastly row, their eyes poached white and palps cut away to expose their gaping, lifeless throats. And on a countertop, in a line of six, yang’ti abdomens, belly-flaps excised to allow their reproductive organs to hang, each one labeled: Adult, good health; Adult, protein deprived; Adult, chronic dehydration; Adult, electric stimulation treatment (5 yrs); Juvenile (10 yrs), good health; Juvenile (?), deformed (?) And that last was most terrifying of all, because it was no spermatogus preserved and displayed, but a female’s ovipositor, and the humans knew enough to know that it was different and put those question marks beside it.

“How could you do this?” Sarah staggered, her eyes too full, her voice broken by horror. “How could anyone—? These are people!” she screamed, and the humans in their plastic aprons and white coats looked at her, startled. “These are people that you’re butchering! These are people! You not-sees! You monsters!”

“Dr. Chapel, please, come.”

One of the humans set down his tools and came curiously forward, stripping away his bloody protective gear.

“Please to take our Miss Fowler,” the dark man said, propelling Sarah forward and into the other’s grip. “And give her thorough examination. I will arrange copies of her medical records to be sent. I think you find them interesting. Very thorough. Omit nothing, ja?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not-see!” Sarah screamed again, and was taken from him.

“And you, my friend, we go just a little further to your new home, but you look around, ja? You look and see what we have here. Think of your little one.” The dark man’s hand reached out as he walked, twitched back a cloth that covered a metal table. The tiny body with his chest-plate pried away and his little heart exposed stared up at him, not dead even long enough for the eyes to blanch. “He died screaming for his father too,” the dark man said, still walking.

It took guns at his back to move Sanford on. He was forced out into the hall without ever really leaving the lab. He stared at the back of the man-monster, the dark man, and could still taste blood and chemicals and death. He did not see the cells they passed, or even the one they opened for him. One of them slipped a noose around his neck and pulled it tight, bringing him almost instantly to the grey edge of unconsciousness while they removed his binders and hobbling bar. Then they pushed him inside and the opportunity never came, never once, to lunge out and bite.

“Now you sit,” the dark man said. “And you have good long think. You come to the right decisions and I can be your best friend in the world. Your little one is crying for you tonight. Tomorrow, we show him the laboratory. This is the last thing he will ever see before we lock him away forever.”

Sanford threw himself forward. They beat him back, of course, of course, and slammed the heavy doors as he fell.

* * *

They put her on one of the tables, one of the metal autopsy tables, after cutting away her clothes and tying on a hospital gown. The gown was white, with a dark blue pattern she first thought were polka dots, but which at second glance proved to be tiny, round I-B-I’s. The metal was very cold where she touched it, all her adrenaline-fired nerves could feel. There were no restraints—their usual patients were already dead—so they checked her struggles with duct tape they found in a drawer. A thousand and two uses. She had to laugh.

“How thorough an exam?” she heard one say after she was down for good.

“Omit nothing, ja?” the doctor replied, in a very passable van Meyer.

They didn’t.

Pulse, blood pressure, respiration rate, oxygen levels, all recorded. Eyes, ears, nose, throat, all examined. They took blood, scraped her skin, cut hair and fingernails, swabbed her pelvis and probed her anus. They took x-rays from her feet clear up to her head, hooked up electrodes for an EKG, and while the doctor sat beside her with an ultrasound wand pressed to her side, an intern arrived with a digital jump-drive—her medical records from Sacred Heart.

The examination was put on pause while everything was printed out.

Then there was a much longer pause.

“This can’t be the right chart,” someone said.

Sarah closed her eyes.

“It has to be,” the doctor said. “That’s the right genetic tag.” His voice was climbing, astonished. He stood up, looking from the lightboard where her latest x-rays had been pinned up to the monitors where the digital feeds of Sacred Heart’s x-rays steadily scrolled. “This has to be…” His hand on her shoulder, shaking her until she opened her eyes on his flushed, excited face. “How did you do this?”

She pressed her lips together and glared at him.

“Oh, this is big, this is huge. Where’s the—Rachel! More blood! And I want spinal fluid! Maybe…maybe marrow…look at her bones! Holy God, look at her ribs!”

“Dr. Chapel.” Van Meyer entered the lab, smiling, flanked by soldiers. “I was right, nee? Interesting reading?”

“You knew about this? My God, when did she—? How did you—? What have you people been working on over there?”

“Nee, nee. She does this herself, with little bug friend. I have the device she used. You tell me what it does, perhaps our little Pollyanna will tell us how it works.”

“What it does…” The doctor bent over her again, his cold hands fumbling impersonally under her gown and his eyes fever-bright. “I can’t say for sure, not yet, not without getting a closer look, but…look at the x-rays! You have to see this!”

And he was away, catching at van Meyer’s impeccable sleeve in his enthusiasm to drag him to the lightboard.

“This is Sacred Heart’s last series of images from when she was released, right? And you can clearly see the fractures there, there, there, and there. Now this is, this is today, this is five minutes ago, and there are no fractures. They’re not healed, there’s no sign of healing, they’re just…gone. I’d really like to cut her open, sir.”

Sarah sighed.

“No, I mean, I need to, because look at this, look at the screen. This is eight days ago. You see the rupture in her liver? They removed—what does it say, Rachel?—twenty-two percent of the lobe. And look, I can show you the difference right now.”

Cold gel on her belly. Sarah kept her eyes shut.

“It’s not whole…you can see this entire section is…uneven and lumpy, but I’d say…I’d say maybe fifteen percent regrowth and it’s all healthy. And down here…Sacred Heart says there was a bruised spleen, gone. Here…Sacred Heart says five tears in the peritoneum, gone. Here…Sacred Heart says massive bruising and swelling of the large intestine, gone. Even her skin…I mean, you can see where the sutures were removed, but the incision is entirely gone! And except for the liver, there is no evidence of healing, only new, clean tissue. I have got to get inside there and look at it, because what I’m seeing here…this isn’t something that’s been repaired, it’s all brand-new!”

“Mm.” Van Meyer’s leathery hand stroked along her cheek; she opened her eyes and looked at him. “Tell me now,” he said, “and no more be done. Tell me how you took it from me. Tell me how you know to take it. Tell me how you convince bug to use it.”

She closed her eyes again.

He patted her head. “Cut her open. For samples only. I wish her alive for now. Good night, Miss Fowler. Do sleep well.”

Piotr’s voice in her ear, his stubbled cheek scratching hers: “I’ll be in later, beautiful. You wait up. Don’t make me wake you.”

They left, van Meyer and his soldiers. The doctor and his assistants stayed, exclaiming over her charts and preparing for her vivisection as for a slumber party.

Over the past few weeks, Sarah had learned that she was actually pretty good with pain. Relatively. She wasn’t invulnerable, wasn’t super-stoic about it, but she could cope. She hoped she could cope with what was coming now. She hoped that if she was going to die, she could do it with some dignity, but she was afraid she couldn’t. Worse than that, she rather suspected she wouldn’t die.

Yesterday…Yesterday, she’d been in bed with her man. His arms were around her, his thighs pricking at hers, and his heart was a drum at her back. Only yesterday, sleeping after love and waking up with T’aki jumping on the bed. How could yesterday bring her to this moment?

“Doctor?” A nurse’s voice, hushed with apprehension. “Doctor, I’m running the first slide and, um…there’s something here that…please, come look at this.”

He and all his aides went, like children rushing across the playground, to crowd up next to the microscope and look.

They weren’t used to patients who weren’t dead. One of them hipchecked the surgical cart into her table. It rattled up against her side, all shiny clamps and forceps and saws and scalpels, so perfectly within reach with everybody’s back to her that she thought at first she must be hallucinating.

Then she reached. Her wrists, bound to the table’s frame, gave less than a quarter-inch, but her fingers were plenty long enough. They closed silently, with ridiculous ease, upon the long handle of a scalpel and no one noticed. They were still clustered at the microscope, every one of them whispering and wanting a turn, fascinated by whatever they saw in whichever sample they’d taken, as she turned the scalpel around and sliced through the duct tape. She cut herself a little, not deep, no big deal. Then she held the scalpel right, sliced it across her other wrist, and then her chest, and then sat up.

‘Stay busy,’ she thought, cutting through tape at her thighs, her knees, her ankles. ‘Look at that blood. Fascinating blood. Really make it work for you. Don’t look at me.’

“That isn’t human,” the doctor said, and all the others seemed to sigh at once, the burden of naming taken ably onto his shoulders. “That’s…I know what that is, but that’s got to be from one of…them.”

She padded barefoot across the tiles, each slap of her feet like a cannon and how could they not hear it? But they didn’t. They didn’t and they were shocked when she grabbed the doctor by his collar and thrust the scalpel under his throat.

She cut him. She didn’t mean to and it wasn’t deep, but it poured blood in curtains over his white smock and made his nurses scream, just like it was the only blood anyone had ever seen in this chamber of horrors.

“Show me your hands,” she said. “All of you. Let me see them, or I swear to God, I will end you.”

They put up their hands fast, like yang’ti do in Cottonwood, flinching with fear and breathing fast, too horrified to make a sound. Their eyes were all the same—a great, glossy confusion over terror, as if she were the maniac in the room.

There was a freezer in the far wall, where they kept the bodies, she assumed. It needed a keycard to unlock, which the doctor did at her command, fumbling so that it took him three tries. On the inside, a hanging Hell of alien corpses, but no key-console and no latch. Door Does Not Open said a helpful sign.

“Get in,” she said.

They tried to argue with her. She cut the doctor again, this time on purpose, across his hands, his livelihood, as deep as she could go. She felt the scalpel grate on bone, saw his fingers wilt when his tendons severed, heard him and all his assistants shriek. They got in. She slammed the door. Leaned on it. Looked down at the blood on her hand and her feet and her hospital gown, and threw up without warning. Not a lot, she hadn’t eaten anything, but she felt better when it was done.

There was no time for this, no time. She kept the scalpel and the doctor’s keycard and ran out into the main bio-lab, the butcher’s lab.

No one was here. She guessed they were all in the freezer now. Hoped so, because she couldn’t stop to explore. Van Meyer had brought them in through one door, the examining room was behind her, and that left only one way to go. The doctor’s card worked for her just fine and she was out in the hall.

Doors, on every side of her, in the longest hall in the world. She ran, right to left, pressing her face to the tiny glass windows of each. Cells, nothing but metal boxes with yang’ti in them. She started to open the first she came to, realized the prisoner within would almost certainly kick her in two as soon as she gave him the opportunity, and left him, anguished, to find Sanford.

He was here, he had to be here. She careened from one wall to the other, banging on glass to make the occupants look at her, then racing on. No Sanford, no T’aki, but they had to be here.

“What the—Hey! Hey you!”

Oh Christ, a guard. Sarah ran faster, her breath coming in little gasping screams she did not hear, frantically peering through windows and banging her fists as running boots ate up the hall and that itch grew between her naked shoulderblades, the itch where the bullets would go.

Sanford! He saw her, leapt up, hit the glass where she did, his eyes as wild as hers must be. She swiped the doctor’s card, changed the LockLite from red to green—

And was yanked backwards by one arm, feeling the snap of the fracture all the way up to her teeth. She screamed and the scream was barbed wire ripping out of her throat. Her vision greyed and the temptation to dive right in and faint was strong, oh yes, it was likely to be the only escape coming to her and only an idiot would try to fool herself into believing otherwise, but then again, she hadn’t been making a lot of smart decisions lately, had she?

Sarah fought back. Not being a fighter, she fought like a girl, reaching back with her good arm for a fistful of hair and pulling until she heard the tearing sound of his scalp coming up. She stomped on his feet. She banged the back of her head repeatedly into his face. She elbowed him in the groin. And at the very first slackening of his grip, she lunged for the door again, swiping the keycard and fumbling at the latch.

“Oh no, you don’t,” the guard began, and that was when Sanford’s cell seemed to explode outward and he was already in the air, both legs drawn up and arms out, like nothing she’d ever seen before, to land on him and twist the head right off his shoulders like he was a pop bottle with a very loose top.

She landed on her butt and screamed again, feeling that jolt all the way up to her teeth too. Sanford bent over her, but she was already up and running to open the next cell.

The yang’ti inside raised his head and studied her without much interest until she actually got the door unlocked. Then she all but saw the thought-bubble appear over his head: his door was open and the human outside was alone and unarmed. In the very next instant, he had seized her by the throat and slammed her into the opposite wall, but before he could rake his spiked forearm across her face, Sanford crashed into him and the two of them went clattering across the floor.

While they were working things out, Sarah fumbled out the keycard and ran to unlock the next cell. In an effort to avoid further misunderstandings, she made sure to give the alien watching her through the narrow window a big, reassuring grin through her tears of pain and panic.

“Sarah!” Sanford was back, feet skidding on the polished floor. He caught at her shoulder to steady himself, looking wildly up and down the hall. “Where did they take T’aki? Did you see?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t in the lab with me. Here.” She pushed the doctor’s keycard blindly into the newly-freed prisoner’s hand and stumbled back to the headless guard to find another one. “You get that side, I’ll get this one.”

“You!” she heard Sanford snap behind her. “Where would they take a child?”

“If he’s not here, he’s on the killing floor,” came the reply, but someone else said, “They keep kennels down that way. If he’s small.”

Sanford leapt away, landed and slid all the way to an intersection, catching himself on the wall there. He clicked loudly, then shouted something to make the prisoners clamoring around her fall silent. He clicked again, a hard, ear-splitting TAK, and listened.

He must have heard something. He ran. Sarah finished with the last cells on her side of the hall and ran after him, pausing only once to drop her scalpel and grab the dead guard’s much more effective big gun. She’d never fired a gun before in her life, but all things considered, it seemed like a hell of a nice day to start.

Sanford clicked again, began to go door to door along this passage, clicking and looking in frustration through the glass. These were not cells anymore, or if they were, they weren’t occupied. She saw tables and chairs in one, stacks of boxes in another. Storerooms, archive rooms, research rooms, break rooms for all she knew.

TAK! And then she heard it too, that rattlesnake sound of T’aki’s I-am-here reply. She ran with her stolen card—someone had to know they were here by now, but no, it still worked—and then Sanford was inside, feeling his way around the plastic kennel that contained his son and pinching in futility at the lock.

“Get down,” he said finally, raised his arm, and brought his spiked elbow down just as he’d done once to Samaritan’s head. And like the head, the kennel cracked.

Again. Again. And then it split and Sanford was ripping it open and pulling T’aki out into his arms. There was no embrace, no father/son exchange of relief. Sanford grabbed him up, chirring in hard, panting breaths, and ran back to the laboratory.

Sanford covered T’aki’s eyes before he went in and they all followed, their many running feet acting as a kind of harmony to the sound of pounding fists on the freezer door. Sarah struggled to keep up. A real hero wouldn’t have been slowed in the slightest by a broken arm, but she was all but blinded by it. Lingering in the lab to catch her breath was not an option. She could smell old yang’ti blood, chemicals, and the sharp stink of her own cooling vomit, all of it much worse than she remembered. Her stomach flipped warningly; she held her breath and didn’t take another until they were out again in the hall.

“Now what?” one of the prisoners asked, not without a bitter sort of laugh. “We’re on a fucking boat. Where do you think we’re going to go?”

“Home,” Sanford said as Sarah opened the door to van Meyer’s warehouse of alien technology. “We are going home.”

Then the elevator doors opened and a young man in lab whites looked up and saw a hall filled with aliens, and Sarah in her blood-stained and tape-striped gown, holding a gun. His face dropped all its color, but he did not scream. He stepped calmly back into the elevator instead and closed the doors. A second later, the alarms went off.

“Inside,” said Sarah. “Hurry!”

She held the door as they poured in, then bashed at the pass-card console with the butt of the gun until it sparked and fell apart. Thunder came rolling down the stairs and Sarah pulled the storeroom door shut and hoped it held a little while.

“Sarah! Here!”

Yes, there. The other room behind the glass where the escape pod teased them. She ran, slipped, struck the door, and screamed.

Sanford looked at her, then looked harder. “Your arm,” he said, almost conversationally.

“It’ll keep,” she managed, tears of pain pouring from her eyes. She swiped the dead guard’s keycard.

Nothing happened.

“Give me the other one!” she shouted, waving frantically until one of the yang’ti stepped up with the doctor’s card.

She swiped it. The LockLite blinked, but stayed red.

Pounding on the storeroom door, followed by shooting, then an ominous sort of silence. Sanford glanced that way, snapped his palps, picked up his code-bank and jumped halfway across the room to land atop a neat stack of crates. He bashed it open with ridiculous ease and pulled out a gun. The code-bank emitted its polite, electronic tone; the gun charged; every yang’ti turned as one and looked at him. In that moment, they ceased to be prisoners as utterly as if they’d never been. They were not refugees. They weren’t colonists. No matter what they had been before, they were soldiers now and they were so much better at it than Sarah. Without discussion, the yang’ti pulled boxes out, took covering positions behind crates and metal counters, aimed their guns as fast as Sanford armed them, and waited.

Sarah threw down her useless keycards and leaned in to look through the safety glass. Not at the ship, but at the door. No card-console on that side, just a latch. She bit her lip, looked at the gun in her hands, then at the glass.

Sanford saw what she meant to do at once, took the gun, thumbed switches, and thrust it back at her. “Aim at an angle!” he called, backing up. “Target one place!” And then he took his position with the rest of them and raised his weapon.

She stepped back, holding the gun out before her, forcing her broken arm up to steady the barrel. Her hand wouldn’t grip right and it weighed about a hundred pounds, but all it had to do was keep the bullets from going wild and she thought she could do that. She thought of all the shoot-em-up movies she’d ever seen with a big automatic like this one, braced her bare feet on the floor, then slipped her finger into the guard and squeezed the trigger.

It was as if a baseball bat came flying invisibly out of space and slammed into her chest. She fell back and hit one of the yang’ti prisoners; he grabbed her arm and steadied her until she righted, then pointed at the storeroom door and clicked, “Hurry!”

A pinpoint of fire had appeared high along the door’s lock-plate. They were cutting their way in.

Sarah staggered forward and peered at the window. The bullets had hit the glass all right, and ricocheted harmlessly off into the unoccupied end of the storeroom, but left nothing behind that she could see as proof of damage, not even a nick. She braced herself again, forced her bad arm up to really grip the barrel, and fired.

Bullets spat out by the dozens, by the hundreds it seemed, rattling her bones and shaking her vision. She stopped, gasping, checked her aim, and fired again.

Cobwebs appeared in the glass, all at once, as if slapped up by God’s own hand. Sarah stopped, adjusted her aching grip, and fired, now with something tangible to aim at.

The cobwebs spread, great chunks of broken white erupting side-by-side until, with a wheeze, the gun gave out. Empty. The window stood.

Sarah half-ran, half-fell against it, tears of pain and disbelief streaming unnoticed from her eyes. She touched the glass and felt hairline cracks and miniscule chips under her fingers. When she pushed, she thought she felt a little give to it. Raising her gun in both hands (and screaming, although she could not hear that and didn’t know she was doing it), she swung it like a club over and over against the window.

The barrel cracked in her hands. The butt splintered. The bullet chamber flew off and hit someone in the back. She kept swinging, bashing at the broken patch like a cavewoman until, all at once and all in one piece, the whole section of cracked glass caved in and fell away, leaving the rest of the window whole around it.

The hole was small. Even after she broke off what she could with her bleeding hand, it was scarcely larger than a basketball.

Fortunately, she knew someone very small.

“T’aki!” she cried. She could barely hear herself, like she was shouting into a pillow. “I need you!”

He grabbed her hand while she was still looking for him in the shadows of the crates. She picked him up in one arm, hugged him tight, and fed him into the other room. He was his father’s son and didn’t need to be told what to do.

The storeroom door crashed open. Yang’ti and humans opened fire at once. Bullets tore through chitin. Human bodies turned in an instant to charred vapor.

T’aki opened the door.

“Sanford!” Sarah shouted, but dimly, so dimly. “Where are you? We’re in!”

He came running, pushed her and T’aki together into a protected corner of the smaller room, and ran to plug his code-bank into the panel at the center of the escape pod’s only door.

Nothing happened.

“Oh God no!” she wailed, and a more heartfelt prayer she had never spoken. It couldn’t all be for this—Fagin and Larry the nice guard and Kate and the horrors in the lab for a dead ship with a locked door.

“Fuck!” snapped Sanford, the only time she’d ever heard him swear. He slammed his foot up on the side of the ship, wedged his fingers underneath the panel and heaved on it until, with a shriek of twisting metal she could feel in her fillings, the whole panel peeled up, snapped off, and went flying off into the corner. Sanford hunkered down, his eyes moving urgently over the exposed cables. A few crossed wires, a loose connection, a little dust in the works; he worked fast and when he slammed the code-bank into its port for the second time, the door released a hiss of ancient air and came groaning open. Sanford was inside at once, shouting for T’aki.

Sarah ran the boy over and got her first real look at an alien craft. It was small. A whole lot smaller than she’d thought from the outside. Bigger than her van, maybe, but not by much.

She turned and looked out into the storeroom, where the firefight went on and on. She could see a dozen yang’ti from here and she knew there were others.

They weren’t all going to fit.

“Sanford…” She leaned into the belly of the ship and saw him in the cockpit, fitting the code-bank to what she could only describe as a dashboard. He pushed three buttons on the console, just three, and light and sound flooded the pod’s interior at once. “Sanford, listen—”

“T’aki, sit down and don’t move. Sarah, find out how they brought this in,” Sanford said curtly, his fingers flying over the controls. Beams of light were shooting up into the air before him, opening into grids, spilling out lettering, flashing symbols as bright as stars for him to dash away with hurried taps and touches. “Something must open—a wall, a panel, something! Hurry!”

She ducked out and looked around. Okay, sure, they didn’t squeeze the pod in through the door or build the room around it. There had to be a hatch. Right.

The walls were completely featureless.

But the rear wall was different from the other three, made of corrugated metal instead of metal panels. And there was a power strip next to the door, with two buttons, one green and one red.

Sarah pressed the green one.

A siren went off directly over her head. In the storeroom, yellow lights spun and flashed. And in here, the rear wall began to fold in on itself like an accordion. She stepped out a short ways onto a metal ramp, letting the sea air hit her in the face and sting at her little wounds, staring around in disbelief at the lower deck of van Meyer’s Zero. She’d imagined somehow that they were so much deeper that to see open sky and ocean was not merely shocking, but actually a little embarrassing.

It took her a moment to realize that in addition to all of IBI’s spare helicopters and a few stacks of lifeboats, Sarah was also looking at dozens of soldiers and people in flight suits just staring back at her.

“Oh,” said Sarah, blinking at them. She took a few steps back; some of them took a few steps forward. She stumbled up against the escape pod and shouted, “Help! Big…Big open door and lots of people headed this way!”

“Get back, you idiot!” someone snapped in her ear and yanked her behind the cover of the pod’s hull. Yang’ti filled the doorway she had just vacated, opening fire. People started shouting, screaming, and shooting back.

Now what? She backed up, clutching her broken arm, smelling smoke and seawater, and turned around. Time to go. The pod wasn’t big enough. The wounded, then. The wounded first.

She ran out into the smoke and the noise, and tripped over her first two targets, sprawling stupidly out in the open as bullets tore over her head. She heard choking and crawled towards it, feeling her way through the smoke until she fell against the chitinous body prone at her feet. She got her arms around him and pulled; he was lighter than she expected. The yang’ti were all so much taller, but of course, they had no bones, not a lot of muscle. She dragged him back to the relative protection behind the safety glass and only then saw the gaping hole in his chest, the blood pouring from between his palps.

“It’s going to be okay,” she heard herself say. “You’re going home. Can you stand?”

“I’m going home,” he gasped, flecking her chest with his blood on every word. “I can fly.”

He knotted his hands in her hospital gown and heaved himself onto his feet with her help. He kept laughing as he ran with her to the pod, laughing through his wet, pain-taut breaths. Sanford was waiting to help them inside. He tried to pull her up too, but she ducked away and raced back into the battleground.

The next man she found shook her off. “Someone has to hold the line!” he shouted at her, firing.

“You have to go now, while you can!”

He looked at her, piercing alien eyes holding her to the spot. “There’s not enough room for everyone,” he said. “You know it. I know it. Leave me alone and get to work.”

She did. She had to. There was no time.

As yang’ti fell back, the humans pressed in. Soon, a small number of soldiers had made the lunge in and were slowly but steadily working their way around the edge of the room, behind the crates, flanking the prisoners and pinning them in cross-fire. It was getting hard to see through the smoke and the electric spray of human bodies, but Sarah kept her feet and concentrated on getting back and forth as fast as possible, bringing them in by ones and twos to the safety of the pod.

And it filled up so fast.

“Strap the wounded in,” she kept saying. “Everybody else, stand up! Leave the guns, there’s no room for guns! Get close, as tight as you can! Please, you’ve got to make room!”

“Sarah!” Sanford fought his way through the hold, pushing some bodies aside and climbing over others in his effort to reach the door. “Now you! There is still room for you! Get in!”

She reached for him, but ducked down screaming as something exploded in the main room, cracking that heavy glass window into instant lace. Crouching here, under the smoke, she squeezed open her eyes and saw a yang’ti sprawled in the doorway, looking back at her.

And it was Baccus.

Half her arm was gone and that side of her body was burnt black from her head to her hip, but recognition was immediate and incontrovertible for all that. It was Che Baccus; it could be no one else. She didn’t speak, maybe couldn’t speak, but in her eyes, Sarah could see that Baccus knew who she was too.

They stared at each other as Sanford called her name.

A second explosion knocked a few chips from the window. They had to go.

Sarah stretched out as far as she could. Baccus took her hand and let herself be pulled, coughing and spitting, to the pod. Sanford held out his hand when he saw her, but his fingers curled when he looked down and saw Baccus clinging to her hospital gown. He looked up again, torn. Behind him, clutched in some stranger’s arms, T’aki began to skree and struggle.

“I’m not leaving you,” Sanford said, again almost conversationally.

“Yes,” she answered. “You are. Please understand. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t if it means leaving someone else behind. You’ve got to take her.”

He reached out again, not for her hand or the injured yang’ti huddled against her knees, but to touch her face.

“I love you,” she whispered. “I do.”

If he answered, she couldn’t hear him. Explosion after explosion rocked the storeroom; they’d started lobbing in concussion bombs. The window cracked and cracked and finally shattered.

Sanford took his hand away. It was bloody. He closed it in a fist, reached down with his other hand and pulled Baccus into the already-packed pod.

There was no more room. He turned away as T’aki screamed for her and shut the door. It sealed with a hiss and a metallic clang of finality. She backed away, her eyes swimming, and was seized in thorny arms and carried out of the little room. “Don’t look!” someone bellowed in her ear. “Burners! Get down!”

So she stumbled with him blindly in the smoke and was still knocked flat when the pod’s engines fired, blasting out safety glass in half-melted hunks of slag. She rolled onto her back and watched it right itself, raise up, slowly turn.

Another concussion bomb went off, this one practically at her feet. She was shoved back, smacked up hard into a stack of crates, and did not see the pod in flight. It didn’t matter, she decided, as her world bled out to grey. He got away, that was the important thing.

The only thing, really.

* * *

It was over by the time she awoke, so she didn’t see the point in resisting anymore. Exhausted, disorientated, and in tremendous pain that seemed to occupy a space ten times the physical dimensions of her broken arm, Sarah let herself be pulled off the floor and cuffed. Someone punched her, she didn’t see who. Someone else spit on her. That was all right. That was just fine. Sanford and T’aki were on their way home and that was all she needed to know.

She was taken belowdecks to a conference room of some kind, where van Meyer, Piotr Lantz, and a handful of other soldiers were already waiting, along with eight yang’ti on their knees with their hands on their heads, most of them bleeding and still choking on smoke residue. Sarah’s escort shoved her roughly down among the yang’ti. Van Meyer calmly came around the side of the table and helped her up, seating her with his usual dignity and chivalry in a chair and patting her on her uninjured shoulder.

“So,” he said, returning to the head of the table. He sat, laced his fingers, and looked at her. “Have you anything to say?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t do more,” she said, honestly.

The soldier nearest her gave her the butt of his rifle right in the worst part of her arm. She screamed, thrashing mindlessly away from the pain until she fell out of her chair onto one of the aliens. Her eyes swam with tears of pain and, yeah, okay, fear. Some hero. She began to understand that she was going to die and even though she accepted that, she didn’t think she was going to be terribly brave about it when it happened. Those tears became a little more insistent; for the moment, she could still blink them back.

Someone put her back in the chair. Van Meyer did not appear to have moved. His expression was one of very mild disappointment and no more. “You should be sorry,” he told her seriously. “You could have done more. Oh ja, you could have cut me so much deeper if only you had been clever instead of…what is the word…? Spunky. How fortunate I am that you are no more than a stupid child.”

“Call me all the names you want. I don’t care.”

“Nee, I suppose you do not. You have done your little mischief and so you are content. And your bug, the one who convince you to trade your life for his, he is content as well. Look around you, my dear. You will not see him here. After all you sacrifice, after all you do for him…he leave you behind. He scuttle away, nee? He abandon you.”

She did not have to look at her fellow prisoners to know they were not dismayed by this pronouncement. Although none spoke, she could hear the soft snaps and scraping sounds that meant contempt. Even she was smiling.

“Oh, you want to believe he’s scuttling, I’m sure you do,” she said. “But if I were you, sir, I’d get out there right now and start making some big changes. You’d better start feeding them right, build some decent homes, and clean up your so-called recycling program, because they are coming back, and when they do, it’ll be with warships and well-trained, well-armed, pissed-off soldiers who will have heard all about what you call integration!”

One of the yang’ti spat. Two others buzzed quietly, tensely.

Van Meyer glanced at them, then returned his eyes to her. He said, “You make it very difficult to help you when you are so eager to betray your people.”

“My people? You’re not my people! You…You’re nothing but a thug! A lying thug!”

“Ja?”

“That’s why you don’t let cameras in! You’re afraid to let people see what you’re really doing and you’re right to be afraid! No matter how much you scare people with your lies, you know no good and reasonable person would ever let you get away with this!”

“Such naiveté.”

“If they could see this place, they would take you down and you know it! Even the people who believe your lies would stop you if they ever set foot on this ship!”

“You think so?” Van Meyer looked indulgently around the room at the men and women sharing it with him. “It hasn’t happened yet, but then, it’s only been…what? Twenty years?”

“It’ll happen,” Sarah insisted. “Sooner or later, people will always do the right thing!”

He laughed at her, long and hearty laughter as rich as coffee. So did his soldiers.

“Well,” he said at last, wiping his eyes. “While I wait for mob of townsfolk with torches, there is still small matter of what to do with you, Miss Fowler. I am afraid I have no opening for spunky young speechwriter, nee? So. So.”

He stood up and came around the table to sit down again before her, thinly smiling, eyes cold. “Before your unwise mischief is made, Dr. Chapel is finding some very interesting DNA…in a very interesting place.”

Confusion took a little of the fire out of her, and then icy understanding came sweeping in to cover it. She didn’t want to, tried not to, but shrank back slightly into her chair.

His smile broadened, never touching his eyes. “And so once again, you surprise me. Once again, it take you to make me think. So long I have been searching for some new boogeyman to show my frightened sheep. The bug himself is no more enough, but the bug who mate with human? And the monster that he produce, ah!”

“You’re insane.”

“I’m sure it comfort you to think so,” he said, patting her cheek. “But it is simple science only…and much easier than to take apart a spaceship and rebuild. We just give a little injection now and then, ja? To soften you up, make you, ah, receptive. Then we find nice bug to fuck you. Ja. Piotr will be disappointed, but there are several ways yet that he can amuse himself without disruption to my plans and I think he deserves small reward for his efforts on my behalf, don’t you?” His eyes shifted to a guard behind her. “Take her and, oh, that one to Cell Four. We begin gene-treatments tomorrow. Tonight is for…getting acquainted. You, bug.”

A sour click on her right as Sarah was pulled to her feet.

“Do your part and I send you back to Buena Vista, ja? What heaven it is, after two months here! You think about it. Think hard.” He glanced at his watch and stood up. “I regret that I must leave you now, Miss Fowler. I have scheduled press conference and since you will not be able to watch for yourself, I feel it is only fair that I tell you what I will be telling them. I will tell them that due to circumstance beyond our control, we lost control of the bug mothership.”

Sarah huffed out a laugh, shaky and tearful as it was. “That’s one way to spin it.”

Van Meyer came around the table and leaned in very close, almost kissing-close, and his eyes were flat and dead. “So we shoot it down.”

The breath caught in her throat, solid enough to choke on.

“We shoot it down and it fall into the sea, lost to us forever.”

“You’re lying,” she said, but she wished she hadn’t. Her voice next to his was thin and fragile, the voice of a stupid child who had seen the escape pod arcing up into the sky…and no more.

“I am sure it comfort you to think so.” He stroked her hair once and then turned around. “No one is coming back, Miss Fowler,” he called, moving calmly and unhurriedly out the door. “No one got away.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

The first flight was a short one, only as far as the system’s sixth planet, where Sanford put them into orbit and went immediately to the medical bay with the wounded. He had no medical training and no idea how to use the more advanced surgical equipment, so anyone whose injuries required more attention than he knew how to give went into a Sleeper. That left him with thirteen men to make the ship ready for its final flight, but even so, it did not take long. The yang’ti prisoners were all technicians, engineers and mechanics; it was plain that they had been at work here, repairing and maintaining the ship’s systems under the watchful eyes of their captors, all the while carefully sabotaging their own efforts so that the ship was never quite functional. The humans had scavenged all they could, but their access was limited and the dark man had clearly been unwilling to damage his prize in the stripping of it. For that, he supposed he should be grateful.

They went to work. There was no sense of time in space, but he was sure that days passed. At last, the engines were primed and the Sleepers charged. Sanford set their course and once the ship was in Slipspace, he put the others in hibernation and took himself to the command deck, alone, standing watch over a navigation’s system that had betrayed them once already. T’aki had not protested when Sanford ordered him into the Sleeper; all the wonder for this ride, the home-going dreamed of even in the egg with Sanford’s whispers against his shell, had all been left on Earth. They were the same family now that they had been before, but now it felt broken.

He found tasteless rations in the officers’ supply deck and ate, more out of habit than hunger. He wandered the ship during his more restless hours, occupying his hands with maintenance and systems tests, but more often only sat in the commander’s chair and watched the stars bend around the ship in impossible streams of light. He stood over T’aki’s Sleeper and talked to the health monitor as if it were his son. When the solitude became more than he could bear, he woke one of the others and Slept, but only for short spans of time. He dreamed too often of hearing Sarah humming somewhere in the dark and never finding her.

Home. Yang’Tak. A world of red and green, wrapped like a jewel in the sky. He felt no relief at the sight of it, only an anxiety to do what he had to do and get back. It would only be home when he came for the second time, when his people were saved and his family was restored to him.

They were surprised to see him. After so long, the only sensible assumption had been that the ship had failed and all lives had been lost. There was a monument garden in the governor’s district. His name was carved onto one of the white bricks that built it. Now the ship was home and the men they took off it were telling them that the ship had indeed failed, stranding its cargo of lives in a strange and hostile world. There was life in the universe other than yang’ti, a planet called Earth, a race called humans, unimaginably different. Some of the humans—and Sanford fought to make it clear it was only some—had seized power enough to lock the yang’ti away in places of terrible captivity. He did not describe them too closely, although he knew that the others likely would. He had escaped only with the help of a human and now they must go back, at once, to rescue those left behind.

He was taken to yang’Tak’s governor. Not to the Hall of the Senators, but to Governor Ro’zhe’t herself, and before her and her consuls, he told the story again.

She did not ask questions. She did not interrupt. When he had said it all, she offered him a seat and, at his refusal, said simply, “Go home.”

He stared at her.

“Your part in this is over, Nk’os’a’knko, and you have the thanks of our beleaguered people. Go home and be healed.”

He was escorted from the consulate, too stunned to argue, and taken home.

The reunion was a haze across his mind. He remembered his father seizing him, sharing breath for the first time since his fifth molt, when he’d decided he was far too grown for such intimate displays. His brothers running to embrace him…and his younger brother had children, the youngest of them nearly to his fourth molt! His father’s father had died, and Y’si’di left for her family House according to custom, but she came to see him and tore off her veils to touch him with her naked hands. They all exclaimed over T’aki, wanting to touch and hold him until the boy fastened himself to Sanford’s leg and would not let go. Finally, his father took him to a room—his uncle Ka’wuta’s room, it used to be—and left him alone.

“When are we leaving?” asked T’aki.

“Soon, I hope,” Sanford replied.

The next day, he was back at the consulate. They admitted him. He waited in the Great Yawn until Governor Ro’zhe’t agreed to see him and he had his say again. Again she listened, asked no questions, made no interruptions. And again, she sent him home.

He went. But he came back.

Every day, he woke, he ate, he placed T’aki in his family’s care, and he made the journey to yang’Tak’s commanding seat, where he climbed the hundred steps to the consulate door and demanded entry. Every day, he got it while lobbyists, reporters and senators were turned away. Every day, Governor Ro’zhe’t agreed to see him and every day, she sent him home once she had.

It rained. It stormed. It began to freeze. Sanford stood stubbornly in the Great Yawn with ice dripping off his palps and freezing to his chest-plate. Ro’zhe’t sent security out with hot drinks and a wrap on the worst days, but she always sent him home when his impassioned words to her were done.

He returned to his family’s House one night to find that T’aki had molted, and he had not been there to see it, explain it, rub warm oil into the pale new chitin or carry the old one proudly out to be burnt. He saw accusation in his brother’s eyes—his brother, who had done a father’s duty while Sanford stood about all day in the consulate for nothing—but when he went in to tuck his son into his nest, all T’aki said was, “Will she still know me?”

“She will always know you,” Sanford said.

“When are we leaving?” asked T’aki, clutching at his hand.

“Soon,” said Sanford. “I hope.”

And the days passed.

At last, as spring’s thaw began to push back the grey sheets of ice on the consulate steps, the governor said, “It is not so simple as just going back. We cannot go to such a place, meet with such a people, and make such a demand unless we are prepared to go to war.”

“Not every human is responsible for the atrocities of our captivity.”

“But they are atrocities,” she said quietly. “And those who are responsible would seem to be in power. I will not go to this world with empty hands and snap my palps and hope for compliance. I will go only when I know I can see the thing done. Bloodlessly, if possible, but I will be prepared for war. This requires a fleet of warships.”

He threw up his hands and skreed frustration so piercingly that guards burst in and had to be coolly dismissed by the governor.

“It is nearly done,” she told him once they were gone. “They tell me within the next two ten-spans, we will be ready to launch. Our military forces have been called and fitted, and stand ready to board. These things take time, Nk’os’a’knko, but we will have our people home. Your part is done, and done very well. Go home.”

He did. And he went back again the next morning.

For six days, she refused the single request he made. On the seventh, with a certain bitter resignation, she gave in and allowed him two places on the flagship for the return to Earth, on the condition that he not bother her between then and launching.

He agreed. The next twelve days saw silence between them.

On the thirteenth, the launching of the fleet. Two hours after the ships were underway, Sanford was standing outside the command center. He had a new request to make. She heard him out, her antennae twitching slightly with incredulity. She refused.

The flight to Earth was every bit as lengthy as it had been to yang’Tak, but Sanford spent very little of it with his son. Every day, he went to the command deck and down the hall to the governor’s suite and asked to see her. Sometimes she made him wait all day, but eventually, her doors opened. She always listened. She asked no questions. She did not interrupt. She just said no.

“How long are you going to do this?” the ship’s commander asked him once, leaning against the sealed hatchway to the command deck.

“I spent twenty years rebuilding one code-bank,” Sanford replied. “I have learned the value of patience.”

The commander clicked thoughtfully and stepped aside.

Governor Ro’zhe’t said no.

They came to Earth (“You say they can understand us, that they have devices for translation?”) and seized the signals of every media satellite in orbit around the world. Across the planet, every television broke into a flurry of static and came back with Ro’zhe’t’s voice.

“People of Earth,” she said. “Many years ago, a ship came to you in desperate trouble, its people stranded, helpless, afraid. You took them by force from their failing ship, detained them, imprisoned them and tortured them. What might have been a dawning of historic peace and unity has become an outrage to our every sense! Our offspring, burned alive or branded! Our injured, starved or slain outright! Our people, forced to live in squalor under the shadow of your guns! No more!”

In the hall outside the command deck, Sanford paced, listening.

“Our ships even now are targeted upon these camps of slavery and death. I strongly advise you to assist in the evacuation in any way that you can, because any resistance from any one of you will be viewed as an open declaration of war and answered accordingly. This is not a negotiation of terms. Do not doubt we have the power to annihilate your people without ever setting foot upon your soil, and do not doubt the vehement will of my people to do just that. This is my only mercy, humans. Comply or be destroyed.”

Following the termination of this speech, control of the satellites was relinquished, where it promptly began to be re-broadcast by the terrified population of a planet that somehow never thought this day would come. The ships drove down through the atmosphere and separated to hover above each teeming mass of yang’ti life-sign that indicated a camp. There were more of them now. The first transport freighters disembarked, and eventually, Governor Ro’zhe’t left the deck, stopped, and stared at Sanford in the hall.

He made his same request.

She listened crossly, refrained from interruption, and refused. Her guards escorted him to his room, where he sat with his son and watched Earth’s media feeds try to make sense of what had just happened.

He was glad he watched. Over the next several hours, he saw IBI’s people in panic, and as many of them fled, more and more of Earth’s reporters managed to get into the camps that had been off-limits for so long. Images were taken, broadcast. People saw for the first time the world in which the yang’ti had been condemned to live: Charred hatcheries, crumbling houses, naked children crawling over refuse for rats, mutilated yang’ti lying in rubble, corpses abandoned in the fly-blown streets.

And they were horrified.

As the world leaders scrambled to both contact the orbiting fleet and console their own panicking people, other humans—the true population—mobilized. Within an hour, they were there: the Red Cross, the PeaceCorps, the National Guard, the Salvation Army, even private citizens in their own vehicles, working under the suspicious eyes of the yang’ti soldiers to help organize the evacuees, to provide food and water, or just to help carry the injured to the waiting freighters. It was good to see what he’d once never imagined he would ever see, and what he’d known he would, having known Sarah.

It was not entirely bloodless. IBI, seemingly leaderless in these last desperate hours, engaged in violent fits both against the evacuating yang’ti and the humans who tried to help them. The native armies of several countries where camps had been established also attempted to confront and disarm yang’ti soldiers, and were dealt with mercilessly. Those few belligerent individuals who came to lob rocks at the departing aliens were also destroyed, but the violence seldom escalated once it became apparent whose weaponry was superior.

By working two freighters at each camp, with one shuttle on standby for those requiring severe and immediate medical aid, and sending out Sweeps on foot with DNA-scanners once the population began to thin, the camps were emptied in only three days. Sanford watched it all, excepting the time he took to sleep and to hunt down Ro’zhe’t to make his day’s request. At the end of that time, there was a lull, as human leaders again attempted contact with apologies and lies, human reporters speculated on what could come next, and yang’ti concerned themselves with organizing hundreds of thousands of frightened, agitated, and malnourished refugees into the ships brought to hold them. Eventually, Governor Ro’zhe’t returned to the media.

“Perhaps I was not clear,” this second broadcast began. “And in the interests of preserving whatever peace can be preserved with a race as murderous as yours, I will endeavor to clarify. We will not leave even one of our people in your hands. We demand the return of all. I give you one more of your days—just one—to bring those you are holding in sadistic captivity to one of the prearranged evacuation points. At the end of that time, I will release my patrols to sweep your planet for victims you may foolishly think to hide. With the use of certain devices, be assured, we can detect even one of our people from among your own, even under twenty kilometers of electronic baffle and rock, and I promise you a vengeance to equal holy Ko’vi’s wrath should we find one. Do not attempt to plead for time. You have had better than twenty years already and see what you have done with it.”

When she emerged from the command deck, there was Sanford, and for the first time in her political career, utterly unmindful of who might be watching (or recording; the evacuations were not only historic news to Earth), Governor Ro’zhe’t snapped, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, what do you want?”

“You know what I want,” he answered.

“No! No! A thousand times, no! By Ko’vi, I think it’s been a thousand times! We are here for our people, Nk’os’a’knko, ours! I have neither the time nor the resources, nor, the truth be known, the slightest inclination to allow you to run about on Earth chasing a human when our people are still dying! No!”

There was only one more argument he could make. He made it.

She stared at him.

Her guards, highly-trained to discretion and hand-picked to show no reaction to the delicate things said in her presence, glanced his way. One of them even clicked.

Sanford stared right back at her, refusing either to plea further or to explain.

At last, at very long last, she said, “You couldn’t possibly hope to find—”

Sanford pulled a medical canister of genetic preservative from his satchel and slammed it down on the short ledge that ran along the hall’s panels. He said nothing.

Ro’zhe’t’s antennae flattened. She pressed hard on the soft plates above her eyes. “You are putting me in an ugly position, Nk’os’a’knko.”

“I could say the same for you.”

“Yes…I suppose you could.” She paced away, muttering something that sounded like, “Piss in a cup and drink it.” But then she came back and said, “Take command of a Sweep. You may deploy with the rest of them after the given period of grace has elapsed and you may stay only, only, until the last of them has reported back. After that, whether you are successful in your search or not, I will order your men to bring you back to the ship. Am I understood?”

“Yes, Governor.”

“Your persistence has been sand under my shell for years now, Nk’os’a’knko. Years.” She looked at him, oddly softened, though no less annoyed. “You should have told me the reason long before this.”

“Should I?” he shot back. “I thought the rescue of a good person reason enough.

“Don’t snap those at me, son. You have only one to account for. I have millions.” She held his stare until he dropped his eyes, then clicked a kind of peace-making goodbye and sent him away.

Sanford went to his room, sat on his bed and rubbed at his eye plates until he became aware of T’aki huddled at his side. The boy’s antennae were flat and tensely quivering, but he did not ask the question which had to be burning in his throat. Nevertheless, Sanford answered it.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

* * *

“…You have had better than twenty years, and see what you have done with it.”

The bug’s image left the screen. The President’s returned, considerably more aged than it had been on the golf course last week, when van Meyer met with him to discuss the outwork programs in Cottonwood and Palmside. He had laughed then, made jokes about burning citronella along the roads to keep the bugs from wandering. Now he gazed earnestly at the camera and told his fellow Americans that they had all been lied to. The United States was a land of freedom and equality and would never condone the slavery of any people. The perpetrators of these heinous acts would be rooted out and prosecuted, and the hearts of the American people naturally went out to the Visitors and their much-abused people.

The Visitors now. Ja.

Outside, somewhere in the compound, gunfire and shouting briefly tore the air. Another retreat, halted. He had given no orders to execute deserters, but the loyalists did anyway. It made them feel better, less prone to panic themselves. He did not mind, but it bothered him that no one had yet thought even to ask for orders. He had none to give them anyway.

It was all falling down.

The camps were empty. Even before the conclusion of the bug’s first stirring speech (the networks relayed it with subtitles within the hour, but van Meyer did not require them. His ear had long been attuned even to the delicate tonal nuance of click and chir), his allies had abandoned him. The rats know first when the ship sinks, they say, and van Meyer had known it was over when his operation’s manager in Silverbrook called to say his men had left. They took their guns, left their whores, and abandoned all posts, as fickle as any common shiprat. Brackendale was next and then Fox Lake and Sweetwater, and by noon of that first day, he had no friends left in any country and no place to go.

He came here, to his Zero, to his home upon the sea. And it was business as usual here in the laboratories, for a time. His captive bugs had not, of course, heard the transmissions, and his worker-sheep were all intent on doing all the research they could now that supply seemed about to dry up. All was, if not good, at least a comforting false front.

And then the second broadcast, and all the worker-sheep who had spoken so convincingly of the pure pursuits of Science suddenly became concerned also with their lives. If the bug did indeed have such devices as they claimed, then Zero was a death warrant the size of a city.

No one asked van Meyer for instructions. There was fighting, but only amongst themselves, and at its sorting-out, the cells were emptied. All the bugs were placed in trucks, driven onto aircraft, flown to an evacuation point. The young bugs had to be loaded in swaddles, unable to adjust to open space and stimulation after four years in little boxes. Several died in transport from the shock alone. Now they were all gone, and still it was not enough. Of a sudden, his faithful sheep recalled that the prisoners who had gone scampering home had come from this very laboratory, these very cells, and they may remember it. They may come back.

And they may, in all honesty.

For the first time in many weeks, van Meyer thought of Pollyanna. Pretty Pollyanna, no longer so pretty, but still nicely contained, who had once called him a common criminal, doomed to be overthrown, or words to that effect. That sooner or later, people will always do the right thing. Precious. To that, he would now make a correction: When no other alternative remains, people will do the right thing.

That time had come, it would seem. And now it was all falling down.

More gunfire. Van Meyer went to the window and gazed out at the lot, watching his sheep slaughter one another. He thought of Pollyanna, who had told him this day would come. And he’d told her the ship had been shot down. She hadn’t believed him, not at first, and it had never broken her quite the way he’d hoped. He wondered if she knew this was finally happening, if it made her happy, gave her peace. He hummed a little, thinking of her. Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

The door opened. “Oh Christ, here you are!”

“Piotr. Come in. Drink?”

“Drink?” His faithful hyena surged forward, wild-eyed, incredulous. “Are you seeing what’s happening out there? I can’t find anyone! The lab is a mess. People are stealing the computers, the files, the fucking dead bugs! You have to get down there!”

“I see.”

“Now!”

“Of course.” Van Meyer straightened his jacket and turned away from the window. “Have you another gun, my friend?” he asked.

Piotr checked himself, blinking rapidly, and raked his hand over his head. “Yeah, yeah, I do.” Belt, shirt, breast…there, an Italian pistol tucked into his boot, fifteen rounds in a plastic grip. He passed it over, already looking calmer, almost reverent, and why not? In all the years of their partnership, he had never seen van Meyer fire a gun. He owned the men who fired them. To see him take one now must seem to him like Christ taking up a whip to cleanse the temples.

“Thank you,” van Meyer said, and clasped his hyena’s shoulder. “Men like us, nee, we control our own destiny and do not cry when the check come due.”

“No, sir.”

“We were close, nee? We were at the cusp.”

“We still have it all,” Piotr said intently. “We’ve got the weapons, we’ve got the ships…we can still get it all out of here. We can start over.”

“Ja, you encourage me. You have always been good and faithful dog. Say goodbye, please, to our pretty Pollyanna. Tell her for me, no bug lick up the blood of Damek van Meyer. To the end, human spirit remain indomitable.”

He smiled, put the gun under his chin and pulled the trigger.

* * *

So the Sweep went on, just as planned—or just as threatened, depending on one’s perspective—with one exception: one soldier at the head of one patrol had calibrated his DNA-scanner not in general, but to a precise and individual match, a match made with blood wiped from Sarah’s brow four long years ago. Before the ship’s engines fired, before the escape from Earth had been realized, that blood had been raced to a medical station and preserved for this day, the day he returned.

The scanner found her; the signal existed and the signal gave signs of life. It was his only hope and encouragement. The scanner could not tell him if she were whole and well, if she were captive, sick or injured. The soldier who still thought of himself as Sanford knew where he had left the woman the signal tracked, and he thought captivity and injury only too likely. This so, no matter how near she was or how smoothly the Sweep was going in other parts of the world, he hurried now.

There was too much smoke when they landed for him to see the ocean and no sense of waves underfoot when he first ran out onto the deck. He did not recognize the floating city, not even when he led them at a run up the short ramp and blasted a hole through the sealed hatchway into the very room he had escaped from. Only when he was inside it, in an old storeroom for munitions and armor, did the first twinge of recognition prick at him. Here, after securing the empty room and stepping aside to allow the Sweep to open the door and explode out into the hall, Sanford’s eye was distracted, first by old charring and bullet-sign tattooed into the walls, and then, to his shock, the small room he had just come through, where the pod that had been his escape craft had been stored. Only then did he realize he had come back to the terrible place called Zero.

And she had never left it.

T’aki ran on ahead, calling to him in frightened tones. The other soldiers responded aggressively, spilling out into the halls with weapons aimed, too ready to fire. They had seen things no soldier, no matter how well-trained, is every truly prepared to see, and the sound of a small child’s fear had become as good as a killing command to them.

He shouldn’t be here, T’aki. The governor had been against it, and he had family enough on yang’Tak to have cared for him while this return flight was made, but Sanford had not allowed their arguments to sway him. They thought he was afraid to lose sight of his son after the horrors of Earth, and he let them think so. He was not. He let T’aki return to Earth and he had fought for the boy’s presence on this Sweep for one reason: T’aki deserved to be here. He had suffered and risked just as much as any of them, and he deserved to be here at the end and not shut worlds away where he would have to wait four more years just to hear someone else tell him about it. Perhaps that made him a bad father. He chose to believe it would also make T’aki a better man.

The signal led him through the laboratory. It had not changed much. Seasoned soldiers stared around them in horror at the victims IBI had not believed they would discover. He supposed they had believed that dead flesh would not be targeted by a DNA-Sweep. Humans had been very wrong about most things when it came to yang’ti.

“Destroy it,” said Sanford, knowing the men under his command would not leave the labs until they had, not for his fool’s errand. “But quickly. She’s this way.”

Humans caught in the laboratory screamed as soldiers opened fire, but they were not targets. Not yet, anyway. If Sanford had not been there, perhaps the story would have another ending. It was so easy to see an alien as less than a person, easy to kill, and these men more than most, as they ran and tried to hide under tables where their own dead kin lay, chitin open and hearts removed. Fire was the best they could do for their unnamed brothers and sisters now, but they used that fire until nothing, no drop of blood or scrap of tissue, remained for the humans to test. Then they moved on, more furious than before.

The cells.

The first they passed was the worst of them, not because of what they saw, but of what they had missed seeing. It was a large room, ten meters tall, fifty meters long, but only five, perhaps, deep. Across that longest wall were boxes, metal boxes just one meter cubed, featureless apart from a single door and a few air holes, stacked floor to ceiling in a single layer. Each was numbered. A cart on a robotic arm ensured human access to every box, if desired, but tubes were in place to provide nutrition and pipes to take waste away. No hand need ever touch the young yang’ti locked inside.

They had all seen the children whose captivity had been spent in these boxes—grey-shelled, hollow-eyed children who started at every movement, and who would sit for hours touching their own receptor pads, speechless—but they had not been able to imagine the cages. This was what the Dark Man had planned for T’aki.

What followed after that was almost easier to bear. Row upon row of empty cells, marked by years of graffiti. Prisoners using blood, chaw, and even piss for paints kept calendars, drew pictures, and wrote words of seething hate, plaintive confusion, and utter despair across the walls that had hemmed them in so many years. My name is still In’d’keo, said one. Another, beneath the shakily-drawn image of tall and small figures, wrote, I am not afraid. I am ready to hold you again. But it was the third, in the style of the old poets, that gave Sanford the first flare of hope: I hear her singing / human throat like a flute they cannot break / Now when she is silent / I know / it is for me to sing / and her to hear. And the fourth, even more telling: If they can do this to their own kind, what hope is there for us?

She had to be close.

The signal, leading him on as humans scattered before him, until he reached the only door still locked in this terrible prison.

“Open it,” he said, when a human was caught and brought to him.

“We complied with the evacuations,” the human told him, stinking of fear and still defiant.

Sanford pulled his after-burner and pushed it close enough to the human’s face that the hair above his enormous eyes smoldered. “Open this door.”

“There’s no bu…There’s none of your kind in there!”

Sanford’s finger moved to the kill-switch.

“I’m doing it!” the human yelled, fumbling in his clothes. “But there’s no bugs in there! You’re wrong! No bugs!”

He swiped his card. The heavy metal door rolled back.

She was singing.

It was no more than a whisper of sound in the dark cell, strengthless, tuneless, but she was singing. He shoved the human into the arms of one of his men and took a step forward, seeing only empty corners and fresh bloodstains. It was the voice of a ghost.

“Touch me where’m bleedin…kiss me where’m torn…love is…love is…love is dang’ris…”

And silence.

“It’s not a bug,” the human stammered.

Sanford gave the DNA-scanner blindly to a pair of hands behind him. He took another step, breathing too hard and too fast. “Sarah?”

“Love is…love is dang’ris…”

“I see her!” T’aki ran and dropped, peering under the room’s only furnishing—a metal plank, bolted to the wall for use as a bed. And she was under it, impossibly small, lost in shadow. T’aki reached in, drew back, and wrung his hands for the first time in years. He shook his head, reduced in the extremity of his anguish to human gestures yet again. “I—I can’t touch her, Father.”

Soldiers held the human at the cell’s door, shifting nervously from leg to leg as they watched Sanford approach and hunker low. He saw flesh, torn, opened, decaying upon her living bones, too many injuries to be counted. The sound of her breath was ragged and uneven; she did not respond to her name when he spoke it. He reached in and, like his son, hesitated because he could not see a place whole enough to touch.

Whispering her name, he drove his hands in anyway, caught her arms close to her body, and pulled her out across a slick of her own blood into the light.

“Blessed Ko’vi, pray for us sinners,” muttered a soldier.

“It’s not a bug,” said the human again, and the soldier holding him cracked him in the head and sent him unconscious to the floor to be kicked away.

They’d taken her hair off, done something to her head; there were burns all around her temple, burns that almost looked electric in origin. They’d starved her, yes, and beaten her until her human bones stretched out her skin in lumps and angles. They’d cut her belly at least ten times, the scars criss-crossing into mindless roadwork. They’d cut her fingers off, all but two on her left hand, and those two were black and broken. There were wounds all over her body, but the worst was on her leg, where infection had eaten her open down to the bone. She looked like nothing human, nothing yang’ti, nothing that could live.

Sanford pulled a mister from his belt and held it up before her swollen mouth. He pressed the switch and released a cloud of stabilizer on her next ragged inhalation. She coughed on it, opened her eyes, and did not know him. She closed them again and her lips moved in silent song.

“Is that going to help?” one of his men asked.

He didn’t know. He eased her carefully up into his arms and held her, counting down the seconds he would have to wait.

“Sarah.” T’aki touched her cheek, the only span of unbruised flesh he could see. “Sarah, listen. Sarah.”

She opened her eyes again, head lolling, and groaned. She blinked, focused. Her lips trembled. “Oh,” she said. “I’m dreaming.” Her words were strange, softened. They’d broken away most of her teeth. She reached up and touched him with her two remaining fingers. She smiled. “And you carry me to the bed and lay me down,” she said. Her hand dropped. She began to drift away.

“Sarah.” T’aki touched her urgently. “Please!”

She rolled her head that way, struggled up from her inner place, and finally looked at him. She smiled. “Hey, jellybean.”

Speaking softly and clearly, T’aki said what he had waited four long years to say to her and what no man, not even his father, had the right to take away: “The Fortesque Freeship is right outside. And we’re putting you on it.”

Soldiers looked at each other.

Sarah smiled, cracking her lips until they oozed blood. “I f-forgot all about that. I…I love you lots, you know that, right?”

T’aki looked at his father, calmer.

He couldn’t wait anymore. The stabilizer would work or it wouldn’t, but she wasn’t going to get any stronger lying here. Sanford picked her up, held her close, and took her back out the way they came as fast as he dared to move.

“Do what you want with this place,” he told his men as he boarded the pod. He understood later that they took their time with it, systematically demolishing the floating city deck by deck before they burned out the hull and allowed it to sink. At one time, Sanford had dreamed of doing such a thing himself, but whatever savage pleasure there might have been in this news once, it meant nothing to him now. He had a heart only for the woman in his arms and the fading life he felt slipping at nearly every breath from between her bleeding lips.

The pod took the three of them to the flagship, not because it was where Sanford was registered, but because it had the best medical facilities. He docked in the emergency port right off the medical bay in direct disobedience to the Docking Master’s orders, opened the airlock, and shoved a furious Governor Ro’zhe’t out of his way without sending her so much as his glance. T’aki ran ahead into the Triage Center, shouting to try and clear a path, and Sanford followed, holding Sarah close.

He hadn’t taken more than ten steps before the first, “Human,” was spoken. Yang’ti turned when he went by, saw the body folded in his arms, and hissed alert to the rest of them. He heard hard snaps, shrill buzzing, the bitter hate for twenty-four years of captivity spitting from them like chaw. They began to close on him, not raising their spikes, not yet, but not letting him pass either. Sanford’s arms closed protectively, pulling her tight against his chest. Too tight; she stirred, not to consciousness, but enough to sing a few more wordless notes of her dying song before she fell limp again.

And across the growing menace of this crowded room, a young man suddenly lunged up and through them all, actually flinging hissing bodies to either side to come close enough to see. He towered over Sanford, chitin broken and in places bisected, peering down at Sarah with the one eye he had left and all four antennae quivering straight out from his head. “My God,” he said, half in English. “I think it’s Hummer.”

Bodies surged forward and suddenly it seemed that everyone was shouting: “Did you come from the floating city? From IBI in the sea? The place the humans call Zero!”

“Let me pass,” Sanford could only say, struggling to reach the doors. “This is not the time, let me pass!”

An old man ducked in ahead of him and breathed frantically over Sarah’s face. He looked up, eyes stricken. “I was there when he cut her fingers off. She said, ‘Don’t let them go to waste.’”

Sanford recoiled.

The medical bay doors whooshed open in a sterile spray then, and the last voice in the world Sanford ever expected to hear boomed out, “Shut the fuck up out here, we are getting to you as fast as we fucking can! You, shut up! All of you, sit down! You’ve all been triaged, you can fucking well—what the hell is that?”

Sanford stared speechless at Cottonwood’s own Good Samaritan, cleaned up and pinned with a temporary medic’s pass, who seemed just as shocked to see him. Sam started to speak and then jerked his eyes down to take a second stare at the bloody mess in Sanford’s arms.

“Jesus Christ,” he clicked, almost whispering. “Is that who I think it is?” And without waiting for an answer, Sam lunged for the com-panel. “Clear Vat Five! Clear it now!” he shouted, spun, and snatched Sarah from Sanford’s arms.

He ran back through the open doors, and Sanford was forced to follow as best he could as Sam tore through the thinner crowds in the Vital Care Wing, leaping bio-beds and occupied vats and even a startled medic before he veered into an empty berth.

Moving with remarkable one-armed dexterity, Sam initialized the console, flooded the vat, and readied a phial, but he was careful, even gentle, as he used that phial to extract blood from the fading vein in Sarah’s throat. She winced from the depths of whatever place she was hiding in, hummed a little, and be damned if Sam didn’t hum softly back at her before looking up to see Sanford.

“What the hell are you doing back here?” he asked, and loaded the phial into the side of the vat with a shove and a slap to start it calibrating. “Never mind, make yourself useful. Help me get her clean.”

‘Clean’ meant the removal of all non-organic masses. Sam held her, clicking impatiently now and then while Sanford carefully cleared away the simple, filthy wrap, old electrode patches, and ancient tape. After he thought she was ready, Sam had a second look, plucked free a few half-buried stitches, and peered into her mouth. “She’s got some metal in her teeth,” he muttered. “Can’t get them out…You’re just going to have to swallow those, sweetheart.”

“Will it hurt her?” Sanford ask.

“Look at her! What isn’t going to hurt her?” But he stopped there, palps grinding, because the vat had finished and opened for them. Sam gave her mouth a final, despairing sort of inspection, then lifted her and laid her gently inside. “Easy,” he murmured when her sleeping body flinched away from the cold, thick fluid. “Easy, easy. Don’t fight it. Christ, they really worked you over this time. If you’re still standing there, come hold her head up.”

Sanford came, slipping his hands into the fluid and under her smooth, round head. He couldn’t do it without thinking of her hair, that yellow flow of soft hair, fanning down over his arms as they joined on the bed in the motel-place. Copulating face to face, floating endlessly through her eyes…there had been no danger in all the world, no possible pain, no possible fear.

Now Sam covered her eyes and plugged her nostrils with seal-gel, and Sanford tore his gaze away from her still and empty face to look at the console above her. The computer didn’t know what to make of human anatomy and what few vital signs it displayed were not encouraging.

“Oh fuck me blind!” Sam snapped, and Sanford looked sharply around to see him holding up the air-line…which terminated in an adult-sized palp-mask. Sam looked at this, at Sarah’s face, and then swore again, snatched up a chitin-knife from the surgical tray and cut the whole thing off. He smeared lubricant around the end and, not without a shudder, pulled open her mouth and just shoved it in.

She gagged, jerked hard and then lay still. Sam bent sharply, pressing his palps almost to her mouth, listening. “I think it’s in okay,” he said.

“You think?”

“You think you can find the lung in this sack of meat better than me? Stand there and shut up.” He bent again, folding himself awkwardly double to press his ear over her chest. “Yeah,” he said, now sounding unmistakably relieved. “Yeah, it’s in. Damn, I’m good.” He straightened up and fumbled for the gel, sealing her lips around the tube to hold it in place. It seemed to work; once air-tight, her chest began to rise and fall in more regular rhythms, letting life-support breathe for her.

“You can let go now,” Sam said, standing back.

He did. It was not easy. He watched her head sink under the thick black fluid until she was entirely submerged and lost to sight. The fluid, charged now with her particular DNA, began to work on her, seeping in through her soft skin to bond with her body’s every cell, reconstructing her from her original genetic codes wherever it encountered damage. The technology had been in use for more than a hundred years on yang’Tak, well-tested and refined, but it remained a process as severe as the injuries themselves, and it went without saying that it had never been used on a human before.

She could still die. It didn’t seem fair to think that after all she had endured to come to this moment, but she would be in the vat for many days, and she could succumb at any time to either the severity of her wounds or the shock of her repairs. There was nothing more any medic could do.

“She actually got you out,” Sam said.

“Yes.”

Sam shook his head, still staring at the vat. Its systems were working, the pumps quietly thumping and the vents rhythmically hissing, but nothing could be seen of Sarah. Her heart was beating faster; the fluid released sedatives to compensate, and it seemed to work, but who knew? “When the ships showed up and they turned us all out, I told everyone I saw it was because of you. But I didn’t really believe it. She got you out, all way to the ship.”

“And eighteen others. The air…is it…?”

“Higher oxygen than she’s used to, but that can only help her right now. Anything to take the strain off her heart…Jesus Christ, son of Ko’vi, I never seen such a stomped-on mess in my life. Why didn’t they just kill her?”

“I don’t know.”

Sam stood quietly for a moment. Then, without warning of any kind, he swung around and punched Sanford right between the eyes. “And you left her there, you fucking bug!” he shouted as medics and soldiers ran toward them in alarm. “Son of shit! I’ll fucking kill you!”

“She wouldn’t come!” Sanford shouted back, one hand pressed to his eye-plates, the other gripping at Sarah’s vat. “There were too many others and no more room! I had to go! Let go of me!” he snapped, shoving blindly at the authoritative hands that tried to pry him away. “Yes, I left her! She begged me to leave her and you don’t know anything about it, you left her back in Cottonwood when she asked you to come along, so you’ve got nothing to say to me now!”

“Come along and do what?” Sam spat, chaw flecking Sanford’s chest on every word. “Sit in her fucking van with your kid while you figure out where to stick it in her?”

“You shut your fucking throat!”

Sam laughed—that shrill, bitter scratch of sound he remembered only too well. “Yeah, you fucked her. You know you fucked her and then you left her to die while you ran home and they’ll probably give you the fucking Star of Honor for it, won’t th—?”

Sanford lunged forward, swinging, but was dragged back by two guards and another surgeon. Someone caught Sam by the arm. Sam, breathing hard and snapping his palps, shook him off. He looked up at the flashing alert lights and then over at the main monitoring station where a small crowd of doctors and their aides had gathered. “We’re done,” he told them. “Get back to work. We’re done.”

The guards holding Sanford started to pull him out of the berth.

“We’re done, I said!” Sam snapped. “Let go of him and get the fuck out of here!”

Sanford, released, straightened his clothes, wiping blood and chaw from his shell with a few curt swipes of his hand. Then he stared into the vat, at the black surface of the gel, which showed him nothing, not even his own reflection. Sam watched the monitor and the fluttering light of Sarah’s human heart beating. Neither spoke for some time.

“Caseworker,” Sam muttered at last. “You know, I heard some of those poor bastards from Zero talking about someone called Hummer, but I never thought they meant my Hummer.”

“They didn’t,” said Sanford. “They meant mine.”

“Fuck you.” At last, Sam seemed to shake himself into the here and now. He snapped his palps and gave Sanford a shove. “Clear out. I’ll call you when she’s ready to take home. Don’t argue with me, I’ll knock your ass down and we both know it.”

Sanford went, found T’aki in the press of the outer bay, and took him back to their shared room. They held each other for hours, waiting. The Sweep continued on Earth another eighteen hours, but for them, the Return was done.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

There were others.

Across the world, a little less than half a million yang’ti were rescued and evacuated and with them, more than two thousand humans. They were friends, lovers, adopted children and adoptive parents—an unexpected and profoundly unwelcome complication to the entire operation. Called upon for a ruling by an increasingly frustrated military council, Governor Ro’zhe’t issued her official stance that all humans should remain on Earth. There followed several wasted days of negotiation and mounting hostility between the officers of the Sweep and refugees who’d had enough of men with guns telling them what to do. At last, the Governor herself came down from the command deck to mediate in person.

All that day, while her fleet’s commanders impatiently waited, she went room to room, meeting with her ravaged people and the aliens they harbored. In the end, they—not Nk’o’sa’knko and his obsession with his one human—stayed the Governor’s hand when the Sweep was ended and an order to exterminate might so easily have fallen. When she finally returned to the command deck, she had changed her policy: Humans should remain on Earth…where appropriate. Despite the immediate protests of her chancellors and the soldiers who had seen the camps, she would not insist on their removal, but instead offered asylum to those in ‘special circumstances’. When warned that this decision might well undo a lifetime’s work as one of yang’Tak’s strongest and most successful leaders, she said, “If I must be vilified by future generations for my flaws, I would rather it be for too much compassion than too little. These people—and they are people, despite what some have said—have done far greater work and by God, they have earned a better ending.”

* * *

Although Sweetwater was meant, like all of the immigration camps, to be isolated from the human population, its construction meant the relocation of several remote villages in northern India. With nowhere else to go, the former residents began to trickle back almost immediately, where they became a cheap source of labor and recreation for IBI’s workforce, and soon their many decrepit houses were built all the way up to the containment wall. The human settlement grew, like the yang’ti population within the walls. At times, there were benefits—the humans often disposed of their dead by tossing them over the wall, where their meat and clothing were very welcome, and the yang’ti quickly learned that their salvage had more value to the humans on the other side of the wall than through IBI’s official channels—but all too often, they were only competitors for the same sparse resources. The uneasy truce that existed between them was one of desperation, not friendship.

So it was an inexplicable impulse, when U’us’ka picked through a deposit of fresh refuse and found a young human, that he should not simply kill it, eat it, and move on. He didn’t. Couldn’t. It wasn’t dead, wasn’t meat…it had just been thrown out.

U’us’ka picked it up for closer inspection and the young human squirmed, clutching his fingers in its tiny fists. He had never seen one so small. It had seemingly just molted out of its egg-stage, still wet and bloodied, squalling weakly in the open air. Although perfectly formed, the child seemed to have no control over its limbs and no understanding of its surroundings. When U’us’ka spoke, it did not even try to answer.

It did not occur to U’us’ka, then or ever, to hand the child over to IBI. What is found on the Heaps is for yang’ti, that had always been the law. He took the baby human back to his poor house, built it a nest in his bed, and cleaned and oiled the tiny limbs to try and minimize the damage of the bad molt it had surely suffered. When it lived, he fed it bug food mixed with the milk of goats whenever he could afford it, and regurgitate whenever he could not. It never did molt again, but did eventually come to hold its head up, and then walk, and finally learn to speak.

U’us’ka called his foundling Arva’u’us’k, and seven years later, the evacuation of Sweetwater found this strange trophy of the Heaps dressed in rags and taped newspapers clinging to U’us’ka’s leg and crying in perfectly clear, if strangely-accented, yang’ze, “Do not take me from my father!” while U’us’ka stared frostily into the startled eyes of the yang’ti rescuers, his hand upon the boy’s thin shoulders, saying over and over, “I am not leaving without my son.”

And with the evacuation stalled and time passing them by, the soldiers had no choice but to allow it. Arva’u’us’k was the first human to board a yang’ti freighter, but there were dozens of others like him waiting to be found. It made Sweetwater’s evacuation slow and difficult, but by the end of it, not a child was left behind, which was more than could be said of the place when humans ran it.

* * *

Agata McDowell, a fifty year-old retired music teacher, first saw the conditions of IBI’s camp Buena Vista on a pirate website while searching for cheap guiros and claves for the playroom at the shelter where she volunteered. The photographs smuggled out of the camp spent less than six hours on the internet before the site was shut down, but made a tremendous impression upon Agata. At her own expense, she traveled south, crossed into South America legally and Buena Vista quite illegally, and for years helped to smuggle in clean water and canned food, livestock, furniture, clothes, and even guns.

By happenstance, she witnessed the horrific raid of a hatchery by IBI’s Population Enforcement Squad, and made it her mission thereafter to never see another. For years, carefully-marked eggs were passed into the old woman’s hands after the day’s smuggled soup was ladled out, and eggs in soup pots were taken back to Agata’s ramshackle hut—no larger or finer than any to be found inside the camp—and tended. Despite the danger, Agata was determined that every child know his father, and through her tireless efforts, kept them all in touch through photographs, letters, and midnight meetings at cracks in the containment wall. She taught them all to speak and read Spanish and English, and quite a few to play piano, and did whatever she could to keep them safe and happy in exile.

Unaware of the return of the yang’ti (any radio or television she might have owned had long ago been sold for livestock), she went about her dangerous routine as normal, loading up her weathered Jeep with blankets, building supplies, and pots of soup, before saying a curt goodbye/warning to her young charges and setting off. She didn’t get far. From a distance, the evacuation of Buena Vista appeared to be a vast and violent riot, and Agata was forced to retreat to her home and wait it out. She was still waiting when the Sweep began, and mere hours after Ro’zhe’t’s second broadcast, Agata’s hut was smashed open by yang’ti soldiers.

Before she had even seen the invaders, the old lady snatched up her shotgun, shouting, “Get down, babies, get down!” and was promptly shot, her weapon and right arm both vaporized in an instant. In the next instant, of course, thirty-eight young yang’ti leapt onto the veteran warriors with sticks, rocks, and Barbie dolls and beat them back out of the hut.

In the ships above, enough desperate fathers telling the same story finally managed to convince someone with authority to send them back down to Earth for their children and for the crippled and unconscious woman who had faithfully safeguarded them all these years. Agata McDowell was transported to the waiting fleet as a hero and treated alongside yang’ti in the medical bay. As soon as she was conscious, apologies were made and brusquely accepted, on one condition. “I’ve lived sixty years on one planet,” she said, her growing arm still propped up in the medic’s harness and her face white with strain. “I want to spend the next sixty on another and see which one I favor.”

She insisted, however, that someone go back for her piano.

* * *

For four years prior to the Return, Rachel Wymunn of IBI’s biological research department had been performing vivisections that were not, to make up in some small part for thirteen previous years of vivisections that were. Her crisis of conscience had been a long time in building; the catalyst, if she’d ever stopped to think about it (and she tried not to), had come when van Meyer brought, not just more bugs, but a human being to the bio-labs of Zero. She had managed to drink away years of doubts and screams and alien blood, but that shout—“You Nazis!”—haunted her. She had been lapsed in her faith pretty much since her teens, but she began to become aware of herself as a Jew all over again, began to have bad dreams.

She didn’t think about the first one. The bug was brought to her lab and left. She put him to sleep, as she had done a thousand times before, with a whiff of gas. She did her measurements and marks, dictated a few notes…and then, without hesitation, instead of picking up the prybar and getting to work, she had zipped him into a bodybag, rolled him onto a dolly, and quickly filled in the rest of the report with false data she could, by this time, rattle off with ease.

As the bug slept, Rachel Wymunn wheeled him out of the laboratory, not to the hazardous waste chute for incineration, but to her room, where there was no place to hide him, not even a lock on the door. Every day, every hour, until her next weekend leave, Rachel waited in a state of astonishing calm for her treachery to be discovered, but the escape, the loss of the ship, and Mr. van Meyer’s human acquisition kept everyone occupied. With the help of a sympathetic pilot and a crewman with just enough authority in the shipping department, she’d simply crated him up and loaded him onto the transport shuttle, and nobody ever knew he was missing.

He was the first, but by the time of the Return, Rachel Wymunn and her Bug Railroad had spirited away one hundred and fifteen bugs, right out from under Damek van Meyer’s nose. She surrendered herself at once to the Sweep that came for them and, not knowing what would happen to any of IBI’s employees, much less those who had worked in Camp Zero, accepted sanctuary as soon as it was offered.

Six months into the return voyage, her body was found: defleshed, disemboweled, and laid out in the manner of a yang’ti vivisection. Of the more than one hundred yang’ti who had taken Rachel’s Railroad to freedom, less than twenty attended her small funeral. Six knelt before the shrine of Ko’vi to touch a funeral cake to the cloth-wrapped box representing a coffin (by necessity, the true remains had already been sent to the matter reclamator), symbolically taking away and eating whatever sins the decedent had committed in life. One of them spat on it instead.

The investigation into her death ended with her funeral. Those responsible were never found.

* * *

There has always been a thriving trade in flesh and the slavery of those who provide it and it came as no surprise that within days of the aliens’ arrival, there were rumors of bug/human pornography for sale if one knew where to look. And despite the overwhelming attitude of repugnance which met those rumors, a lot of people went looking. In time, more than half the camps would supply steady merchandise for IBI’s own secret production house, ‘bug fux picturez’, but none were as prolific as Siberia’s infamous Silverbrook. The stud of that stable was a huge black-and-yellow bull called by them Ivan the Terrible, kept serviced by thirty-one girls of every flavor, some brought for breaking even before their menses, replaced at the ancient and unworkable age of twenty-two.

At the time of the Return, the military forces of IBI abandoned Silverbrook entirely, leaving yang’ti to be evacuated without resistance. It was several days before Ivan was discovered, deep in the concrete bunkers below the ice, where he had taken over his captors’ abandoned chambers and done his best to keep his girls warm in spite of a failing generator and sub-zero temperatures. At first sight of these yang’ti with weapons, the girls were understandably transformed to a screaming, terrified mob which Ivan rose over in a terrible column of black and burning gold, to roar in a voice like yang’ti thunder, “Put those fucking things down or you’ll be eating them, oslayobs!”

At the end of a lengthy and often violent negotiation, all thirty-one girls and Ivan were loaded together onto an evacuation freighter. Three attempts were made to gently encourage the humans to return to Earth. Three yang’ti negotiators were forcibly expelled through Ivan’s door with split chitin and a new appreciation of the Russian language. On yang’Tak, where Ivan’s reputation for being terrible was more or less well-known even when he was U’we’vos, a modest house with private yard was quickly arranged by his relations, and there he went to live with his strange family in even stranger domesticity, teaching them to cook, to sew, to garden and to write, and sleeping at night all together in a great nest occupying the full floor of his front room. Which may mean little in the great scheme of things, but which may also suggest that no one is always terrible.

* * *

If one man could be named responsible for bringing the plight of the bug home to the public eye, that man would have to be Nik Dimitrius, a freelance photojournalist who spent every day of his life after the first landing of the alien ship sneaking images of the lives and deaths of the bugs onto the internet. His gripping photos of the immigration camp slums, of bugs eating garbage, of executions and abuse, defined for many what First Contact truly meant. They also caused him to be arrested escaping from camp Golden Plains and thrown into a remote prison, unmarked, unrecorded, and unnoticed—save by the yang’ti who shared his cinderblock cell.

Over the years, prisoners came and went as IBI’s research into alien physiology continued, but as resources began to shift toward Zero’s superior laboratories, the need for prisoners at Golden Plains waned. The cells below the camp emptied and were not refilled until no one was left except Nik and one yang’ti. Alone in their black and windowless room for eight years, fed once in a while, drinking water from the leaking pipes that ran through their ceiling, the two had nothing to do but talk. Laugh. Sleep. Touch (episodes that were positively homosexual by yang’ti standards, and which Nik never thought of as more than frightened handholding). And survive solely by one another’s friendship and company.

After the Sweep, this yang’ti carried Nik into the light of a free day and then into a shuttle to a waiting ship, where he could be treated for the devastating effects of his long imprisonment. Offered a home with his cellmate, Nik accepted, saying the war of public opinion was bound to be as vital on yang’Tak as the world he left behind him. He left Earth, where the photograph of his release from prison made front pages all over the world the next day and won some other photojournalist every award in the business.

* * *

With the return of the bugs, panic landed hard on IBI’s overseas operations, and some of the worst horrors happened within hours of the evacuation. After that first broadcast, the soldiers of Cinderhorn declared martial law, locked the entire facility down, and began to systematically shoot every bug they saw and every human that interfered, objected or tried to leave. With this inescapable wave of violence moving across the camp, a young accountant left his office and drove home to his wife, the mother of his three children. “They’re going to kill them all,” he said without preamble. “If you see the chance, take the kids and run, but I’ve got to try and stop this. I’ve stood for a lot, I know I have, but I can’t let them die like this. Please forgive me.” And of course she did, not because he needed forgiving, but because he needed to hear it, and she sent him back to work. Weeping, she waited with the radio on while she fed her children, gave them all a sip of Benadryl, and hid their sleeping bodies around the house.

At one o’clock, the garages where the armored vehicles and ammunition meant to flatten the containment area were minutes away from Operation: Raid Kills Bugs experienced a series of explosions. Several of IBI’s soldiers were killed. So was the accountant, who was caught when his own charges unexpectedly detonated in the second munitions bay, but who left enough remains to be identified.

Fifteen minutes later, six vans descended on his home. His wife was dragged into her driveway and held while her house was ransacked. In broad daylight, before a hundred IBI families, before the barred walls of the camp where countless bugs watched, two of the children were found, pulled into the yard, and executed before their screaming mother. The baby, sleeping in a drawer underneath the accountant’s socks and boxers, was not. The hysterical mother was allowed to howl over the bodies long enough for IBI’s finest to have a nerve-cooling smoke, and then she was shot, raped, shot again, and left in the yard with her underwear in her mouth.

During the evacuation of Cinderhorn, only a few hours later, several yang’ti left the smoking ruins of their camp and crossed the yard to the undisturbed scene of this carnage. Some gathered up the bodies and burned them. Others, who had seen the baby in mother’s or father’s arms before, searched the house. The yang’ti who found it was Sa’oti’nk, father of a third-molt son himself. Not knowing the baby’s name, he named her I’sha’ and took her past protesting neighbors (including her wailing grandparents, held back by yang’ti soldiers) onto the ship. The statue of I’sha’ in her father’s arm with her brother running ahead of them, stands in front of the Prisoners of Earth memorial on yang’Tak, and is perhaps the best known in the world.

* * *

Two years before the Return, waitress Tammy Weeks was walking to the bus when she happened to see a group of teenagers roughing up a bug in a darkened alley. Just how the bug had escaped from the nearby immigration camp did not seem to matter just then (although Tammy was quite frightened of the bugs under ordinary circumstances), seeing as baseball bats were involved and blood was flying. Not thinking—if she’d thought, she wouldn’t have done it—Tammy rushed over, screaming for help. The kids gave their victim a last volley of kicks and blows and ran. Mistaking her for one of his attackers, Ik’n’nok swung wildly at the half-seen shape that loomed over him next, his arm-spikes opening her cheek, neck and chest in a ghastly wound that, despite stitching at the free clinic later that night, turned Tammy’s already rather homely face into a horror mask.

Despite this, she took the bug home (not a brave girl; perhaps she was in shock), to clean him up. There, Ik’n’nok (not a violent man; he’d been half-crazed with pain and terror) spent the rest of the night mumbling apologies through his mangled palps that she couldn’t understand anyway. She fed him and kept him safe in her closet, but his wounds steadily worsened and after several nerve-wracking days, he asked for help getting back home. After dark, Tammy and her suspiciously tall and lumpy grandmother slipped out of her apartment, out of town, and out across the terrifyingly open trash-strewn plains towards the stark white walls of Beauty Gunyah. Hidden beneath a molding mattress heaped with used diapers was a tunnel. Tammy helped him down, covered the tunnel back up, and tried to forget the whole thing after he was gone.

But she was a buggie now and the proof was right on her face. She lost her job and her apartment, was rejected at shelters, chased in the street, thrown out of shops. At last, homeless, hungry and feverish, she crawled back beneath that stinking mattress and through the lightless tunnel into the bug-camp itself. Yang’ti left her alone as she staggered through the slums, until Ik’n’nok heard of the scar, recognized it, and came to get her.

For years, she lived with him in his shack, trying to be useful. She scraped out a little fireplace where she could cook the food he brought home and served it on hubcap plates with hand-carved forks so that she had dishes to wash afterwards. She made curtains out of newspapers and hung them over the rusted holes in his railway car. She found a little wire that wasn’t too badly rusted and used it and some broken glass to make windchimes to hang next to the door. For years, they slept together squeezed onto a sagging fold-out recliner, and eventually, inevitably, she put her arms around him in the night and snuggled timidly close, whispering his name. Ik’n’nok, unprepared and ignorant of human anatomy, made a gallant effort to grievous effect, but she did ultimately stop bleeding and they got better at it. A little. Eventually.

After the evacuation, he took her to the medical bay to have her scars removed and her original homely face restored, and then to his assigned room, where he stood staring nervously out the portal while he told her she could go home now. He did not say that he didn’t want her to feel obligated to stay with him just because he’d made her so dependent on him and he’d gotten used to her…liked her…wanted to be with her. It was hard enough to say the little that he did. Tammy, for her part, managed after several false starts to ask if he wanted her to go, and this was hard enough for her. She couldn’t just come out and say that she thought he loved her, because, well, maybe that was a stupid thing to think. A few clumsy mountings every few days when she put her arms around him might not mean love to them, who knew? But she thought…he brought her things he thought she might like from the Heaps…he seemed to enjoy her cooking (and it wasn’t easy when most of what one had was canned bug food)…and he put his arm around her at night (he put his leg around her too, that chair was tiny). Did he want her to go? Because she would if he wanted that, but did he want her to go? He wanted her to be happy, he eventually said, still staring at the window.

“Can’t I be happy here?” asked Tammy in a whisper, and for her, this was as bold as brass tacks.

“Can you be happy here?” Ik’n’nok ventured cautiously, holding his breath and tucking in all his palps.

“I’d like to try. I…I…I’m happiest with you,” said Tammy, and turned a shocking shade of red which Ik’n’nok didn’t notice because holding his breath had rendered him temporarily color-blind. Instead, he attempted clumsily to embrace her, and she him, which ended in a short, messy, painful bout of nevertheless quite sweet and sincere love-making, which they got better at.

A little.

Eventually.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

She knew it was bad when nothing hurt, but oh, she did not want to wake up. She supposed she knew she was dying, and knew it no longer in an abstract, ‘this is getting really bad’ way, but a dull and exhausted, ‘one day, I’m just going to feel my heart stop’ resignation. She was surprised every time she woke up. Sometimes she wondered if she was dead already and the dreams—those vivid forays into peaceful insanity—were all a part of what came after, the last confused eternities as her brain finally fired down for rest.

Rest.

Strange that she didn’t feel tired. These days, she always woke up tired, stole her little sips of real life through a haze of soul-deep exhaustion, and slept again until the pain woke her up. But nothing hurt…and she wasn’t tired.

It felt like the beginning all over again, before they started really hurting her, when all van Meyer could think to do with her was move her from one yang’ti’s cell to another and order them to breed. She spent those first days just sitting, each of them in their separate corners, not looking at each other, not speaking, just passing the time until van Meyer came in with his soldiers to punish them. She wished she could have been like one of those girls in the movies, defiant to the last, the kind of badass bitch that would fight back every time and maybe even win once in a while. She wasn’t. No matter how many times it happened, she always ended sobbing on the floor in a huddled heap, begging them to stop. And then van Meyer would look down on her in his grandfatherly way and ask her why it had to be like this, why so much pain, why not simply do what he knew she had done before and benefit all mankind, because if she did not, the pain would have to continue.

She’d laughed at him once. She had to laugh. “What else can you do to me?” she’d asked. “You killed my sister. You even killed my dog. My whole family is gone. I have nothing left for you to threaten. All you can do now is kill me. Go ahead!”

“No,” he’d said gently. “Not all.” And gave the nod to his men again.

Afterwards, in the dark of the night, the yang’ti sharing that cell had quietly said, “I can, you know. If it makes them stop hurting you.”

“It won’t,” she’d answered wearily. “But you can, if you think it’ll make them stop hurting you.”

But he didn’t, and it really didn’t matter because soon afterwards, they gave up on voluntary procreation and moved her to the lab to harvest her ovaries. God alone knew what they did to get material from the yang’ti, but they must have done something, because there were plenty of implantations.

And of course it hadn’t worked. No matter what they did, no matter what ‘treatment’ they used, nothing they put in her grew. After so long (years, she thought, although she didn’t know how many), she dared to hope they’d given up on the idea, and certainly, they’d given up on her as brood-queen of this new race. It had been months since the last attempt, months since anything big, really. Sometimes she went days entirely untouched, just fed and watered and occasionally hosed down. Cared for, as minimally as possible, until van Meyer could think of something new to do with her.

And then something happened. What was it? Some commotion in the halls, all frightened voices and shouting and slamming doors. They took the yang’ti away, but not her. She slept, she woke, she dreamed. Then Piotr came, not with van Meyer, but all alone. She thought he shot a doctor in the doorway, but maybe she dreamed that part. She didn’t dream what happened next, though.

God, he really hurt her this time. Pounding on her, kicking and stomping on her, screaming something about it being her fault. She’d blacked out a couple of times, but he kept bringing her back out of it. When she finally woke alone, she couldn’t believe it. She remembered being terrified of the emptiness, knowing he was still there somewhere, invisible. She crawled under her bench where it was small and safe and no one could find her, and there she slept again, and dreamed, and maybe died.

Had she died? She really didn’t think she was sleeping, so what did that leave? This had to be one of the other dreams, the waking dreams. If so, it was a really nice one.

Sarah worked her eyes open. The room was dark and swam with peaceful color. She thought she was in bed, a soft bed, softer than any she’d ever been in. Except maybe her bed at Cottonwood. Memory gel. With heating and cooling functions. Where Fagin barfed up a wax orange the very first day.

Oh Fagin…

A blur of bluish-green swam closer. She drew it into focus, feeling no urgency. Urgency had a way of splintering the waking dreams back into the cell, into reality. She wasn’t crazy yet, couldn’t live in these worlds all the time. It took effort.

T’aki. T’aki’s little round head and big eyes peeking over the side of the mattress. She guessed she knew where she was now. Dreaming of the cabin, the morning after the Great Escape. Lemon jelly doughnuts on her pillow and Sanford’s arms around her like prickly bars of iron. But it wasn’t quite the same. It was a nicer bed, for one thing. For another—

“I’m forgetting what you looked like,” Sarah croaked, gazing at him mournfully. “You were shorter.”

“I grew,” the ghost of T’aki said.

Then he put his arms up and crawled onto the side of the bed. Sarah groaned, shrinking back. The dreams talked to her all the time and that was fine, but they couldn’t touch her. When T’aki touched her, when his arms passed insubstantially through her own, he would wink away and her heart would break all over. Her heart was always breaking. It just couldn’t keep doing that before it gave up and stopped.

And then, cool chitin touched her shoulders. She gasped hard (a sure way to wake up these days, but her broken ribs didn’t hurt; nothing hurt) and lay frozen as the small body snuggled up against her, pulling his arms and legs up small between them.

“Hold me,” T’aki chirred, pressing his head against her chest. “You can’t hurt me. Hold me tight. I have to feel you hold me, okay?”

She didn’t want to move. Moving would wake her up. She didn’t want to touch him. Touching him would wake her up. But he was here. She brought her arms up slowly, pressing her shaking fingertips to his smooth shell, and neither he nor the room around her vanished. She squeezed, squeezed until her disbelieving arms ached, but he stayed solid. Sobbing, she rolled onto her side and curled up around him, her hands cupping and patting at his head, rubbing his back, pricking themselves on the first tiny thorns growing from his little arms and legs. He chirred, tiny palps vibrating against her breastbone, and he stayed real.

“You are bigger,” she managed to say at last. “You did grow. You’re not going to be my jellybean much longer.”

“Always always.” He uncurled and cupped her face in his strange, centipede-like fingers, staring anxiously into her eyes. “You were in a long time. They wouldn’t let me see you. And then you slept and slept. But you’re better now, right?”

Her head swam. She shook it and touched him again, stroking his soft throat under his palps so that he closed his eyes and chirred again. He felt so real. She had to be awake.

“Can you get up?” T’aki asked. “I want to show you.”

“Show me…” She pulled her hand back and stared at it, her head swimming harder. She had fingers. She touched them as T’aki climbed down from the bed. Perfect fingers, all ten of them, baby-pale and smooth against her thin, rough palm.

Hesitantly, she touched her mouth and felt teeth, all her teeth…even her wisdom molars, and she’d had those pulled when she was fourteen. She ran her hands down her chest and her ribs were all solid beneath her skin. She was wearing…wearing…what was she wearing? A soft white tent, with holes for her arms and neck, faintly shiny, thin but heavy. Heart pounding, she pushed back the bedsheets (same fabric, she noticed), pulled up her gown-thing, and stared in awe at her straight, white legs. Even the scar from falling off Kate’s bike that summer was gone. Her hair…no, her hair was still gone, but so were the scars left by Dr. Chapel’s electroshock ‘treatments’.

“Sarah?” And he bounced, that absolutely fundamental T’aki-bounce. “Come and see!”

She got up (white gown, soft bed, new body…I’m dead) and let him take her hand and lead her to the window. She could see the stars outside, so beautiful, brighter than they’d ever been, even in Brookings. Stars and stars and then the cool, blue curve of the glowing Earth.

Sarah’s breath puffed out of her. She put her hand up to touch the glass, but it wasn’t glass. Just like the walls weren’t plaster, she supposed, and the sheet she was wearing wasn’t cotton. She looked at Earth and saw, hanging suspended all around it, sleek black ships alive with lights.

‘The Fortesque Freeship is right outside…’ Had she dreamed that? Sounded familiar. She felt T’aki’s hand reach up to catch hers; she found the receptor-pads in his palm and stroked them gently.

“We’re going home soon,” T’aki said.

“Did you…Did you get everyone?”

“Yes.”

And she turned, because that wasn’t T’aki, that was—

He’d been sitting on a bench in the darkest side of the room. Now he stood and came a few steps toward her. Just a few. She knew him at once, and then wondered how she knew, because all his clothes were different. Gone was the flannel shirt and cargo shorts patched with duct tape. Gone were the carpenter’s belts and the ammo strap full of batteries. His vest was black and green and shimmered, not ostentatiously, but just enough to be both bold and striking. His breeches had a herringbone texture pressed into the dark fabric and a front panel of more shimmery black. His feet were covered; she hadn’t been able even to imagine the shoes that could fit over the yang’ti foot, but there they were. And his clothes were moot, they were entirely moot, because even in the dimness of this strange room, those were Sanford’s eyes.

“We’re going home soon,” T’aki said again. “To the big house. It has a yard like yours did, only bigger. Father’s father says you can have the green room.”

Sarah looked out the window at Earth. ‘I’m not ready,’ she thought, surprised. Even in the Great Escape, she’d only thought about getting them away, never about what would happen after. Leave Earth?

No more cheeseburgers, no Chinese food? No new dog chasing Fagin’s old rubber ball, no more hope of ever catching a Fortesque B-Flick on the late-night sci-fi station? No Halloween, no Christmas. No car that she could drive, no favorite book she’d ever pick up at a garage sale. No garage sales, maybe. Leave Earth.

“Or Father says…we can have a new house. If you like that better.”

Sarah tickled at his palm, smiling at Earth, her last look at Earth. “It really doesn’t matter, jellybean,” she said. “We’re family wherever we go.”

He hugged her thighs, both together, no longer just a knee-high hopper, but nearly as tall as her hip. She rubbed his head and then his shoulder-joints, and looked at Sanford over her shoulder, thinking, ‘I’m going to have to meet this man’s father,’ but how bad could the in-laws be when they were willing to give her the green room? She heard herself laugh a little. Actually laugh. What had happened to the last four years?

Sanford clicked, unlocking T’aki’s reluctant arms. Then the boy was leaving, and no sooner had he cleared those whooshing Star-Trek doors than Sanford began to remove his totally moot clothes. She laughed again, her hand pressed flat against the sleek non-glass surface of the window, and watched him come for her. She didn’t think it was possible to remove pants while walking, but he did it. Easily.

He pulled the gown over her head. She raised her arms to help and lowered them again around his neck. His palps fanned. They breathed together. He lifted her into his ridiculously stick-like and thorn-spiked arms and carried her to the bed.

“I’m not dreaming, am I?” she asked as he lay her down. “I dream this one a lot. Please be real.”

He breathed again, then touched his palps along her neck, the very tips lightly drumming as he maneuvered himself atop her in the most painful, least comfortable, and perfect position. He was real. He was real shifting her legs wide around his thorny thighs, real when she felt him enter and plunge deep. He looked into her eyes and came at once, his hard chest pressed firmly over her breast, trembling slightly in his paralytic spasm.

She held him until it cleared, and when he blinked and softly chirred, she reached up and found a place beside his mouth to kiss. They shared breath again and she relaxed back into the bedding, wonderfully at peace.

“Here I have been, in this moment,” he said, “since I left you behind me. Now you are here. I am ready to move on. Come with me.”

She nodded once, and he reared back and began to move inside her.

Oh, he would. Out of reach so there was nothing she could do but lie there and take it. Sarah arched, hands slipping over his smooth shell, giving in first to strained whimpers and then to full cries. Why not? This was what he wanted and the walls seemed pretty thick to her. She surrendered up to it entirely and lived in that moment, cumming easily and inexorably as the tides, long after time and place ceased to having any meaning.

It ended as it began, with him lowering himself tight against her heart and washing her aching womb with his cool release. When he was back, he pulled the sheet up over both of them and lay close, still joined, motionless, sealed together in his cocoon and breathing one another’s air.

“I am you,” he whispered, soft against her skin. “I have always been you.”

“And I am you,” she answered, feeling silly, but in a good way, the best way.

“Tell me when you are ready for more.”

“I’m ready now,” she said, embracing him.

And so, apparently, was he.

* * *

He made her go to dinner. She didn’t want to go, but not even her protests swayed him. He donned his clothes relentlessly, draped her in hers, stuck his head out into the other room to order T’aki to wash up, and came back to pull the sheets off the bed. Dinner was not negotiable.

“But why do we have to go out?” Sarah grumbled, stubbornly lying on the bare bed. “Don’t tell me that your advanced technology can shoot you across the galaxy faster than the speed of light but you still have to walk all the way down to the cafeteria to make a sandwich. Can’t we just…press some magic buttons and bring dinner to us? Then we can stay in and make love all night.”

“On every night hereafter,” he promised, coming to tow her gently but decisively onto her feet. “Tonight, we go out.”

“Why?”

“It’s a party!” T’aki chirped, bouncing on the bed with one shoe on and one held over his head. “A big party!”

“How big?” Sarah asked, alarmed.

Sanford caught up his son and set him firmly down again. “They know who you are,” he said, strapping on the errant shoe and tightening the other. “They expect to see you at my side.”

“Sanford, I—I can’t do that to them. A human at your big rescue party? Seriously, no. Some of them are bound to hate me.”

“No. Not where we are going. This, I promise you.”

His promise was good enough. It shouldn’t have been, but it was.

They left his rooms and went out into the hall, Sarah walking in between Sanford and T’aki, one of her hands held by each of them. They looked good, she thought, all dressed in green and black, their chitin shining and heads held high. She looked like a bald lady in a bed sheet.

They passed a lot of yang’ti in the hall. Too many. Not going anywhere, but just standing there, crowded together, as if they’d been waiting just to see them. Some of them buzzed when she passed them, a buzz that came in pulses through fanned palps, almost as if they were spitting the sound at her, except…it didn’t sound angry. She thought she saw faces she knew among them, even thought she saw John Byrnes—John Byrnes, the first alien she’d ever met—and she tried to stop and see if it was really him, but whoever it was merely raised one hand in a slight wave and ducked away.

Sanford took her to an elevator (an elevator on a spaceship!) and as soon as the doors shut on the buzzing hall, she sagged back into the wall and whoofed out breath.

“You’re doing fine,” Sanford said.

“They like you,” added T’aki.

“It doesn’t feel real, any of it. All those people and…” She touched her gown, rubbing nervously over her stomach and feeling it smooth and whole beneath the fabric. She tried to laugh. “I was in the cell just yesterday.”

“No, you weren’t,” said T’aki. “You were in the vat. For days and days and—”

“Hush. Sarah. You have left the cell, Sarah.” Sanford touched her hand. “I have left Cottonwood. We are here now. We are moving on and we do not have to bring that with us.”

The elevator finished going up and went sideways for a while. Very futurific. She giggled, watching the lights fly by. “Tell me about the green room,” she said, just to say something.

“It has a big window,” T’aki chirped promptly. “Over the yard. And a big, big bed. Father’s father said that was important.”

“Hush,” Sanford said again, in that tone that meant he’d be smiling if he could.

“Okay, so…they’re all clear on that, uh, that aspect of things.” Sarah rubbed at her blushing cheeks. “Good.”

“If not entirely at ease, I warn you. But they will be happy to welcome you home.” He hesitated, clicking. “If you would prefer a house of our own—”

“After so many years, I would never dream of taking you from your family.” Her stomach tried to twist; she forced it calm and smiled for him. “I’m sure we’ll…we’ll all get along just fine.”

“Yes.”

“There are fourteen people in the house,” T’aki inserted. “And five of them are children, but I’m the youngest.”

Dear Lord. That was a lot of in-laws to win over.

Sanford squeezed her hand.

The elevator stopped, went up three more floors, and then opened the doors. Sarah looked up and got hit in the face by a wall of pulsating buzzes. Not a hallway now, not a hundred yang’ti in single file waiting to watch her walk by, but a room, a huge room, so full of them that there were guards—not armed, but still obviously guards—keeping a path clear to the doors at the opposite side. To her shock, she actually did know faces in this crowd, not many, but more than a few, from both Cottonwood and the bio-lab. It threw her, badly. She’d guessed by now that the buzzing was some kind of cheering, but she’d assumed it was for Sanford, the hero, the bringer of the cavalry. Now she realized with a hot flare that they were also cheering for her.

Her legs buckled. Sanford’s arm slipped around her waist, holding her up in an unobtrusive way. T’aki still kept his grip on her hand, waving and buzzing cheerfully back at the crowd, oblivious.

“Do you see the doors?” Sanford asked. “We will go through the doors. We will sit down. We will eat. We will hear a few stories. You are not expected to speak. We will go back to our room. We will put T’aki to bed. We will copulate many times—”

She laughed.

“—and we will sleep. It is the only time, do you understand?” He clicked in her ear, then added, “Until we are home on yang’Tak. Then, one more, my family only.”

“Okay.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

She started walking. The buzzing got louder. They were on every side of her, some of them slapping rhythmically at their chest plates or shouting as she passed by. If there were words in what they were chanting, she couldn’t make them out. All she heard was noise; all she saw were armored bodies and vibrating palps. That dream-like sense of unreality began to well up, trying to tell her this wasn’t really happening, that she would close her eyes and open them back in the cell, smelling the stink of old urine and rotten meat, hearing nothing but the stuttering of her stubborn heart and the rasp of her shallow breaths echoing off the empty walls. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t over; it was just a matter of time until she woke up.

And just then, like an iron spike through her rising panic, came a voice she knew, a voice she never thought she’d hear again: “Sure, just walk on by, caseworker. Don’t even say hello.”

Sanford tried to keep her walking (his antennae snapped flat, annoyed), but Sarah dug in her feet and made him stop. She turned around, searching the mash of yang’ti faces and there he was, just behind one of the guards, his arms folded human-style, looking at her.

Samaritan.

Shock held her in place for a second or two. Then Sarah let go of T’aki’s hand and started toward him. Sanford caught at her arm. She waved him back distractedly and kept going. The other yang’ti buzzed louder, some of them slapping at their chest-plates now. The guards looked at each other and stepped uncertainly aside to let her pass if she wanted, leaving her target open to her. Samaritan, exposed, uncrossed his arms and looked wary.

“Go ahead,” he said when she reached him. “I love that rough pre-play.”

“I heard your voice a lot in that cell,” Sarah said, looking straight into his eyes. “And it got me through the worst days of my life. I told myself that if I lived, I’d find a way to tell you that, and that you are the biggest asshole I have ever known.”

He blinked, thought about that, shrugged a little.

“And I guess sometimes that’s what it takes,” said Sarah, as quietly as the buzzing room allowed. “I’m glad I got to see you again.”

She put out her hand.

He looked at it, then beyond her, presumably to where Sanford watched. He clicked a few times. Then he took it, carefully, and moved his thumb to press awkwardly down into her palm. She touched his receptor-pads in return, still holding his gaze. He flinched a little and then just looked at her, not leering, not doing much of anything. Just looking. And suddenly, from someplace deep and lost inside her, she caught a fragment of something that felt like a memory: blackness, weight all around her like a wet fist, and his voice, Samaritan’s voice…come back sarah stay with me…

But surely that was one of the dreams. He never called her by her name.

No, he had once, hadn’t he? The day he picked her up off the causeway and carried her back to his place, the day he’d stabbed her with that shiny machine…“Sarah, look at me”…but even now, most of what she remembered was Sanford bending over her, Sanford holding her down. Still, those were Samaritan’s eyes back then, looking at her now the same way.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Sarah said, frowning as she tried to clear the fog and find that memory. “You were the one who fixed me.”

“The vat did all the hard work,” he said. “I just put you in it. Naked,” he added.

She yanked her hand back. “Prick.”

“Oh, I had my hands all over you, caseworker.” He waggled his palps. “And if I’d known you were that into chitin, I’d have climbed right in with you.”

She turned around, stalking back to Sanford and T’aki, trying not to swear. She told herself not to do it…and then she swung around, ready to have it all out right here in front of the whole damn room.

He wasn’t leering at her. He was just standing there, looking at her. And before she could say anything, before she could even think of something to say, he turned around and pushed his way into the crowd, vanishing right in front of her.

Sanford took her arm, asking a question with his eyes that she didn’t know how to answer. Yes, she supposed she was all right, but this, all of this…began to feel like too much again. The cheering grated on her ears; they always cheered at war’s end, but then the recriminations started, and she was going to wear the same human face that had devastated countless lives. It was too much.

The buzzing stopped.

Sarah looked up, moving instinctively closer to Sanford, enough to feel his sharp side-thorns digging at her arm.

The doors had opened and a yang’ti was coming toward them. Taller than Sanford, and older, she thought, wearing a complicated harness and half a dozen loin-cloths in pale robin’s egg blue wrapped around his abdomen and thighs. There was never any question who this imposing figure aimed for, and even T’aki stood quiet and respectful as Sarah found herself bored down upon.

There was only one person she could think of who this could be. Softly, trying not to press too obviously into Sanford’s side, she whispered, “Is this, um, your f-father?”

“No,” he said at once, comfortingly. “She is the governor of all yang’Tak.”

Panic swelled, but she had nowhere to run. The stranger, the governor, reached them and stood, looking down at her for a very long time. Her palps snapped now and then. Her antennae were low.

Sanford’s finger stroked her palm.

“I have heard a great deal about you,” the governor said finally. “I have, in fact, heard little else for years.” Her eyes snapped to Sanford, who gazed back blandly. She clicked and looked at Sarah again. “Nk’os’a’knko is quite convincing. If he were not so persistent, I would demand no less than the eradication of your people after what horrors have befallen my own.”

Sarah opened her mouth. Sanford squeezed her hand hard.

“But I saw you carried in. And I have met with some of the others.” The governor relaxed the stiff set of her legs, lowering herself perhaps three inches. It gentled her expression some and softened her hard tone. “And I begin to realize that even though great evil moved through your world, still there were persons of good and courageous heart who tried to stop it. I should hate to see our own race judged by the darkest deeds of the worst men at the most evil hours of our history.”

The governor raised herself up again, still facing Sarah, but managing somehow to address the whole room anyway. Her hands spread, not quite touching either her or Sanford, but certainly adopting the posture of a benevolent and rehearsed embrace. She began to wonder if this was being recorded somewhere.

“And so,” the governor said clearly, “after much thought, I can say that we will leave your Earth whole behind us, not for fear of those who imagined themselves our superiors, but for the sake of them who tried against terrible risk to prove our friends. The atrocities of Earth can never be forgotten, but we must not allow those atrocities to dictate our futures. I have come to believe, Sarah, Nk’os’a’knko, that the alliance of human and yang’ti has been intended, has been ordained, and though it may have been repelled through evil acts for many years, still it triumphs today and we shall both be better for it.”

She lowered herself again, looking back into Sarah’s eyes and speaking directly to her. “And I can welcome you among us, Sarah—” She couldn’t seem to say the name without clicking, and judging by the quick downwards flicks of her antennae, it annoyed her. She must have been practicing. “—and ask sincerely that Ko’vi bless this union.”

The governor offered her hands as the room erupted in ear-splitting buzzes, and Sarah took them, touching and being queasily touched in return. Not thrilled, she saw, but okay with it, with her. If the in-laws were anything like this, she thought she’d be okay.

Sanford took her arm and they walked on, following the blue-wrapped yang’ti through the doors and into the other room, which was empty at the moment, but beautifully-set, with shiny metal and glass dishes and sparkling lights hanging on filaments as thin as spiderwebs across the ceiling. Every long table was decked out with swaths of black and green fabric, dotted with tiny white-metal decorations that almost looked like little flowers. There was plenty of food, but it didn’t look or smell too bad, and there was even a little bowl of what she thought might be bread at the smaller center table where Sanford seemed to be steering her. It was all incredibly light and delicate and beautiful and suddenly she was laughing all over again, because it had started to look weirdly familiar too.

“What is it?” Sanford asked quietly, waving to the yang’ti who were beginning to file in behind them and find their seats.

“It looks like a wedding reception,” she said, knowing he probably didn’t know that word and she’d just have to explain it, not knowing how she could possibly do that.

But Sanford merely glanced at her, that oddly smiling glance, and kept waving.

She stared at him, stunned.

“I couldn’t explain the cake,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“When…When did we get married?” she blurted, and laughed. “Was it…Was it out there just now, that speech?”

“No.” He stroked her palm. “It was four years ago, in a cabin by the water, with our son asleep in the next room. You spoke an oath to me. I gave you mine.”

She could feel herself starting to smile. “You drink water from my hand,” she murmured, remembering. “I bare my back to you.”

He chirred softly, hesitated, and looked directly at her, as if this room and the dozens—God, hundreds—of people watching them had ceased to matter, ceased to exist. “I told Governor Ro’zhe’t you were my bondmate to force her to allow me to search for you,” he said. “But I did not lie to her.”

“No,” she agreed, smiling. “You didn’t lie.”

“This is only a formality.” He brought her to the table and sat her down on the incredibly bumpy yang’ti chair, then sat beside her. “A show. The one my father plans will be much smaller and far more traditional. Be warned. You will be expected to take ownership of the hatchery. I will teach you what to say.” He clicked, watching her closely. “Will you be happy?”

“Hatchery? You…you know I can’t give you children.”

He clicked. “I shall have to be content with gratuitous sex. Will you be happy?”

“It sure sounds like it, doesn’t it?”

She took the cup he gave her and drank the unbelievably tart and unpleasant liquid it contained so that the whole room could buzz and carry on, then lifted T’aki onto her lap and let him start piling things onto her platter. It was all very strange and uncomfortable, the first alien day of her new alien life, but she had her family here beside her and the worst of days behind her, and so Sarah took her husband’s hand and with him, she moved on.

August 2009

November 2012

AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD…

This author’s note (like most author’s notes, in my personal opinion) is not necessary to read in order to understand the story that precedes it. You can skip it. My next book will also have an author’s afterword. You can skip that one too. But if you are one of those people who like to know where the writer got his or her idea, please continue reading. If not…close the book and move on with your life, I guess. You’ll only hurt my feelings a little bit.

I have the dubious pleasure of living with a medical condition that frequently necessitates prolonged periods of lying around and recovering. It gets very boring. I watch a lot of bad movies. I write a lot of bad books.

One day, I found myself watching yet another movie in the theme of “humans land on alien planet and proceed to heroically slash/burn the existing civilization because aliens are bad even when you bust in on them at home and the human spirit is indomitable!” It occurred to me, as ending credits rolled on humans triumphantly kissing over a heap of smoldering alien corpses, that I would really like to see the tables turned, just once. Say the humans crash on the alien planet and discover that they are not the superior race and that ransacking their way through the population is, in fact, a bad idea that goes very badly for them. That idea percolated until it spit out a corollary idea: Say the aliens do come to Earth, but not on purpose. Say they aren’t invaders at all, but just colonists who crash on our inhabited planet. That one’s been done before (Alien Nation springs immediately to mind), but I thought I could put a new spin on it.

So I went back and forth between those ideas and ultimately decided that I would do both. We-go-there became The Last Hour of Gann. They-come-here became Cottonwood.

Now that I had stories, I needed aliens. Real aliens. Obvious, unavoidable, holy-crap-that’s-a aliens. I didn’t want to go the easy route of just having something that was essentially human but with weird eyes who could otherwise blend right in (you know, like I did with my aliens in Heat), but I lack the imagination to pull off a truly alien alien, like a cloud of gas or crystalline parasite. So I took the tried and true sci-fi path of taking an existing animal here on Earth and thinly disguising it as an alien. Back I went to the Waffle Iron, this time over whether I wanted bugs or lizards as my base alien model. Again, I split the difference. The Last Hour of Gann got the lizards simply because I wanted my crashed humans to walk through a more relatable environment than alien hives. The bugs came to Earth.

I wrote the first draft of Cottonwood in two weeks. It’s funny what you can accomplish when you can’t get out of bed. I typed it up over another two weeks. And then a little movie called District 9 came out and the story I thought was so original became a blatant ripoff literally overnight. So I threw the whole thing in a mental woodchipper and tried to forget it. Here I thought I’d had an original idea…damn you, Neill Blomkamp. Just…damn you.

Eventually, I saw District 9. And after I’d finished my rough draft of Gann and needed something else to do, I decided to give Cottonwood another shot. Yes, there are similarities (There were a lot more before I started editing), but I like to think that there’s room in this wide world for two stories about alien arthropods stranded on Earth. Neill Blomkamp wrote a profoundly moving political work that uses the concept of aliens to spotlight the very real plight of apartheid in South Africa. I cranked out some smexxy bug sci-fi in two weeks. So…yeah. The only thing that strikes me as uncomfortably similar anymore is the fact that Blomkamp’s bug hero had a kid, too…but I just didn’t have the heart to write T’aki out of existence. Whether or not that was the right decision, only time will tell, but the bottom line is this: If I let every book I ever read or movie I’ve ever seen censor my own work, I’d never write again. So here’s Cottonwood. Read on for an excerpt from The Last Hour of Gann, available soon.

R. Lee Smith

AMBER

The eviction notice was hanging on the door when they got back from the hospital. The time stamp said 1:27 am, six minutes after Mary Shelley Bierce’s official time of death, an hour and twenty-eight minutes before her two daughters sitting in the waiting room had even been informed.

Amber sent Nicci in to bed while she stood out in the hall and read. The eviction gave them thirty days to either vacate or sign under the terms of the new lease, a copy of which was attached. Amber read them. Then she folded up the notice and slipped it into her pocket. She made herself a pot of coffee and sipped at it while watching the news. She thought. She said hello when Nicci woke up and that was all. She went to work.

The funeral was held three days later, a Tuesday. The insurance company covered the cost, which meant it was a group job, and although it was scheduled ‘between the hours of eight and eleven,’ the other funerals apparently dragged long and then there was lunch and so it was nearly two in the afternoon before Mary’s name was called and the cardboard case with her label pasted on the side slid by on the belt and disappeared into the oven. Nicci cried a little. Amber put her arm around her. They got a lot of dirty looks from the other mourners, even though it had only been sixteen years since Measure 34 had passed—Zero Population Growth, Zero Tolerance—and they had both been born by then.

Amber was used to getting dirty looks when she went out with Nicci. Sometimes siblings could pass themselves off as cousins or, even better, as just friends, but not the Bierce girls. Even with different fathers, they were each their mother in miniature and the three years between them had an oddly plastic quality: in the right light, they could be mistaken for twins; in the wrong light, Amber had occasionally been addressed as Nicci’s mother. Part of that was the size difference—Nicci was, as their mother used to be, fine-boned and willowy below that round, cherubic face, while Amber was pretty much round all over—but not all of it. “You were just born old, little girl,” as her mom used to say. “You were born to take care of things.”

She tried to take it as a compliment. The only part of Mary Bierce that knew how to be a mother had been cut out years ago and tossed in a baggie with a biohazard stamp on the side. The parts that were left after that didn’t give a damn about homework or lunches or scrubbing out the toilet once in a while. Someone had to be the responsible one and if Amber wasn’t actually born knowing that, she sure learned it in hurry.

* * *

There could have been a lot more than two children at the funeral if it hadn’t been for Measure 34. Mary Bierce (known to her clients as Bo Peep for her curly blonde hair, big blue eyes and child-sweet face, a name she was quick to capitalize on with frilly panties and ribbons and the intermittent plush sheep) had never been the careful sort. Amber had been putting out cigarettes, sweeping up broken bottles, and making sure the door was locked since she was six; she knew damned well that her mom wasn’t going to lose a good tip by insisting her clients wore a condom when she was working. Bo Peep had been to the aborters three times that Amber knew of and there had probably been others, but that all ended with the Zeros and Measure 34. One day, she went off for her regular monthly shots and came staggering home three hours later wearing a diaper. She sort of collapsed onto the sofa, sprawled out like she was drunk, only she wasn’t loud and laughing the way she ought to be. Her mouth had hung open slightly and there was some kind of gooey paste caked at the corners of her lips. All her makeup had been wiped away and none too gently; she looked haggard and sick and dead. Nicci—easily frightened under normal circumstances and utterly terrified by this slack-faced stranger who looked like their mom—started crying, and once she did, Mary Bierce burst out into huge, wet sobs also. She lay spread out over the sofa with her legs wide open and that plastic diaper showing under her skirt while her daughters hugged each other and stared, but all she seemed capable of saying was one nonsensical word.

“Spayed!” their mother wept, over and over, until she was screaming it. Screaming and digging at her stomach so hard that one of her bubblegum-pink fingernails broke right off. “Spayed me! Those motherfuckers spayed me!”

At last, in a kind of desperation to quiet everybody down before one of the neighbors had them written up again, Amber climbed up on the kitchen counter and brought down a bottle of her mom’s black label. She poured a juice glass for Mary and, after a moment’s uneasy deliberation, a sippy-cup for Nicci and made them both drink. Within an hour, they were both asleep, but her mom kept crying even then, in a breathy, wailing way she couldn’t quite wake up for, and all she could say was that word.

Spayed.

Later, of course, she had plenty to say—about Measure 34 and the Zero-Pop zealots who passed it, about the insurance company and their fine print policies, and about men. It always came back to the men.

“They’ll spay the hookers, sure they will,” she’d sneer at some point. “But do they ever talk about neutering the fucking johns? Oh no! No, they’re still selling Viagra on the fucking TV, that’s what they’re doing! Let me tell you something, babies, what I do is the most honest work in the world because all women are whores! That’s how men see it and if that’s how they see it, little girl, that’s how it is!”

And Amber would nod, because sometimes if you agreed enough early on, the real shouting never got started, but privately she had her doubts. Privately she thought, even then at the age of eight and especially as she got older and Bo Peep Bierce grew more and more embittered, that it didn’t prove a whole lot to say that men thought all women were whores when the only men you saw in a day were the ones…well, buying a whore. If you want to hang with a better class of man, Amber would think as she nodded along with her mother’s rants, quit whoring.

Not that you could quit these days. But it had still been her choice to start.

And these probably weren’t the most respectful thoughts to be having at your mother’s funeral. Amber gave Nicci’s shaking shoulders a few more pats and tried to think of good things, happy memories, but there weren’t many. Her mind got to wandering back toward the eviction and the Manifestors. It had better be today, she decided, listening to Nicci cry.

After the funeral. But today.

* * *

She didn’t say anything until they got back to the apartment. Then Amber sat her baby sister at the kitchen table and put two short stacks of papers in front of her. One was the eviction notice, the new lease, and a copy of their mother’s insurance policy. The other was an information packet with the words Manifest Destiny printed in starry black and white letters on the first page.

“Please,” said Nicci, trying to squirm away. “Not right now, okay?”

“Right now,” said Amber. She sat down on the other side of the table, then had to reach out and catch her sister’s hand to keep her from escaping. It was not a gentle grip, but Amber kept it in spite of Nicci’s wince and teary, reproachful look. Sometimes, the bad stuff needed to be said. That was the one thing Mary Bierce used to say that Amber did believe.

“We’re going to lose this place,” Amber said bluntly. “No matter what we do—”

“Don’t say that!”

“—we’re going to lose it.”

“I can get another job!” Nicci insisted.

“Yeah, you can. So can I. And they’ll be two more full-time shifts at minimum wage under that fucking salary cap because we dropped out of school. And that means that the most—the absolute most, Nicci—that we can make between us will be not quite half what we’d need for the new rent.”

“What…? N-no…” Nicci fumbled at the papers on the table, staring without comprehension at the neat, lawyerly print on the new lease. “They…They can’t do that!”

“Yes, they can. They did. Maybe they couldn’t raise Mama’s rent, but they can sure do it to us.”

“How do they expect us to pay this much every month?”

“They don’t. They expect to evict us. They want to get a better class of person in here,” she added with a trace of wry humor, “and I can’t say I blame them.”

“But…But where are we supposed to go?”

“They don’t care,” said Amber, shrugging. “And they don’t have to care. We do. And we’ve only got about four weeks to figure it out, so you really need to—” She broke it off there and made herself take a few breaths, because stop whining wasn’t going to move the situation anywhere but from bad to worse. “We need to think,” she finished, “about what we can do to help ourselves.”

Nicci gave her a wet, blank stare and moved the papers around some more. “I don’t…Where…What do you want to do?”

Amber picked up the brochure and moved it a little closer to her sister’s trembling hands. “I went to see the Manifestors.”

Nicci stared at her. “No,” she said. Not in a tough way, maybe, but not as feebly as she’d been saying things either. “Amber, no!”

“Then we’re going to have to go on the state.” She had a pamphlet for that option, too. She tossed it on the table in front of Nicci with a loud, ugly slap of sound. More a booklet than a pamphlet, really, with none of the pretty fonts and colorful pictures the Manifestors put in their own brochure. “Read it,” she said.

“No!”

“Okay. I’ll just run down the bullet points for you. To begin with, it’ll take six to eight weeks before we’re accepted, if we’re accepted, so we’ll still lose this place. However, once we’re homeless, there shouldn’t be any trouble getting a priority stamp on our application to move into a state-run housing dorm, so there’s that.”

Nicci put both hands to her face and sobbed harder. Amber’s own eyes tried to sting, but she wouldn’t let them. Crying was a pointless little-girl thing to do and it hadn’t fixed one goddamn thing since it had been invented by the very first pointless little girl. Problems only got solved when you did something about them.

“We’ll only be allowed to take one standard-size carry-case each,” said Amber evenly, watching her baby sister cry, “and we can’t afford a storage pod, so most of this stuff will have to be sold or left behind.”

“Stop it! Please, just stop!”

“And we probably won’t be able to live together. Not in the same dorm room, maybe not even in the same complex.”

“I can’t be alone!”

“You won’t be alone, Nicci. You’ll be rooming with up to seven other women, they’ll just be strangers.”

“No!”

“We’ll lose our jobs and have to work a state-job as partial payment for those dorms, where our salary cap will be half what it is now, so once we move into those dorms, we are never getting out.”

“No!”

“Yes, dammit!” Amber snapped. “These are the facts, Nicci! We can’t stay here and nothing we do can change that. This place is all over. Maybe if we had enough time, we could find another place we could afford on just what we’re making now, but you know goddamned well that we’d end up on a first-served list and we could be there for years! Where are we going to live in the meantime, huh?”

“You could get more time!” Nicci snatched at the lease, tearing it in her haste. “Did you even ask? There has to be a number that…that you could call and they’ll give us more time if they know we’re…on a list or…”

“We can file for a four-week extension,” said Amber. “That’s what we can do, and only if we can prove we can pay the lease at the end of those four weeks. That’s all they care about and that’s all they have to care about. Everything else is on us.”

“Then I’ll do like Mama did! I’m not leaving!”

“You mean you want to be a whore.”

Nicci flinched. Amber did not.

“You want to do like Mama did,” said Amber, ruthless and calm as her stomach churned. “You want to be a whore.”

“I…”

“How are you going to fuck men—”

That flinch again.

“—for money—”

Nicci broke, tried to get up. Amber caught her by the wrist again and held on in spite of her sister’s squirming efforts to tug free. She hated this, hated herself, but she kept on talking and her voice never shook. Sometimes you had to say the bad stuff, right, Mama? Right.

“—if you can’t even admit you’ll be a whore?”

“I can do it,” whispered Nicci, but she wouldn’t look at Amber.

“Maybe you could, but you couldn’t do it here, and you had better be sure that’s the way you want to go because they don’t let you stop anymore once you start. You’ll have to get the barcode and you’ll be subject to scans at any time. They’ll cancel your insurance—look at me, Nicci—and garnish your wages to pay for the state insurance and all your monthly tests, plus the initial registration and the operation where they spay you, and you know it took Mama five years to pay all that off. And in the meantime, where will you be living? Because you still won’t be able to pay the new lease on a state-paid whore’s salary and this place will still be just as gone.”

“Stop it!” Nicci shouted. “Stop bullying me! I’m not leaving!”

Amber pressed her lips together and folded her hands. She told herself she wasn’t a bully. “What are you going to do, Nicci? Where are you going to go?”

“Shut up!” Nicci beat her palms on the table loud enough that old Mrs. Simon in the next apartment banged her cane on the wall. “I’m not leaving! You can’t make me leave, Amber! You can’t make me leave the planet!”

“I’m not making you do anything,” said Amber, knowing damned well it was a lie. “I’m just telling you that I’m going, with or without you.”

Nicci stared, her mouth working in silent horror.

“There is no other place for us to go,” said Amber.

And she waited, but Nicci still couldn’t find anything to say, so she picked up the brochure and started to flip through it.

“So I went to see the Manifestors,” she said. She sounded, to her own ears, a lot like the pinch-faced old man at the orientation seminar, trying to be professional while still getting through something deeply unpleasant and perhaps contagious as quickly as possible. Everyone knew about the Manifest Destiny Society and their ship; she said it anyway. “They’ve still got room. I guess they’re having some trouble filling their quota for young women, so we’re actually guaranteed a contract if we apply.”

“They’re having trouble because it’s never been tested!”

“Sure it has. They’ve Tunneled out to all the other planets.”

“Oh what? To Neptune? Saturn?” Nicci uttered a shrill, fearful laugh and shook her head. “They’ve never taken it to this other place! This…This…”

“Plymouth,” supplied Amber, not without rolling her eyes a little. The Director of the Manifest Destiny Society was simply full of the pioneering spirit. “They’re calling the planet Plymouth.”

“I don’t care what they’re calling it! I don’t want to go!”

“You don’t have to. But I am,” said Amber again, and watched her baby sister start to cry. “The trip’s going to take about three years, they said, but we’ll be in Sleepers the whole time. That’s kind of like in the movies, when they freeze you, only we won’t actually be frozen. We won’t feel anything and we won’t age, although the guy said sometimes the umbilical…the place where they plug you in leaves a pretty gnarly scar. Those weren’t his exact words—”

“Amber!” Nicci wailed.

She waited, but that was apparently the sum and substance of Nicci’s argument, so after a moment, she just went on.

“When we get there, the ship lands and becomes like the staging area for the colony. We’ll be building the colony up around it—farms and stuff, I guess—but civilians like me won’t be responsible for much. I guess it’ll be pretty hard work, but it’s only supposed to be a six-hour shift, which is less than I’m working now. I got one of their silver civilian contracts, which means five years—Earth years, that is, and it doesn’t include the transport time. They’re going to pay me twenty thousand dollars a year, plus five thousand just for being a fertile female of childbearing age.”

Nicci looked up, her tears hitching to a brief stop in her throat. “W-what?”

“Plus another ten thousand for every kid I have while I’m there, but I’m not having any. I told them that, and they said that was my decision, but I still have to take my implant out before I go. They won’t pay for that, but they do pay for a full medical exam and I’ll get all my shots so I’m clean to go. By a doctor,” she added. “Not some insurance company’s medico. Plus, I’ll get the Vaccine.”

Not a vaccine. The Vaccine. And even Nicci, who obviously tried so hard to understand as little as she possibly could, knew what that was. Because before the Director had been the leader of a bunch of space-happy freaks, he’d been a doctor, and much as he would like to say that his greatest contribution to humanity was the ship that would carry the first colonists to another world (and he said that a lot), he would probably always be known best for the Vaccine, which worked itself all the way down into your DNA and made it so you could never get sick again. Here on Earth, people paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to endure the agonizing year-long process while the Vaccine was introduced, but the Director was just giving them all away to his happy little colonists, who’d get them painlessly in their Sleepers, which was the perfect application process, according to the brochure. No more worrying about that niggling little 14% failure rate or the greatly exaggerated reports of the birth defects caused by genetic drift. They’d just wake up, secure in the knowledge that now they were cured for life of every possible virus—of the flu, of HIV, of whatever alien illness might be crawling around on Plymouth. Of everything.

Amber could see this sweeping, silent argument hammering away at Nicci’s defenses. Ever since the Ebola attack at the UN summit, there had been a dramatic end to the prohibitions on biological warfare. These days, it was fight fire with fire, and now it seemed every country was bragging about the bugs they could grow. Super-polio, rabies-13, dengue, hanta, yellowpox and God only knew what else. They lived in the city. They were a target. It could happen any day.

“Well…” Nicci ran her wet eyes over the papers on the table without seeming to really see any of them. “Can’t we go on the next ship? When we know it’s safe?”

“No.”

“There’s going to be more!” She reached tentatively for the Manifestor’s pamphlet, but withdrew her hand without touching it. “We can take the next one, okay?”

“No, Nicci. They only pay people to be colonists for the first ship, because it’s the first and everyone wants to wait and see what happens. After it gets there safe and sound, the Manifestors stop paying and start charging.”

“You don’t know that!”

“I do know that, actually, because I was there and I talked to them. I also know that the next three ships are already booked, so it’s this or nothing. Well,” she amended ruthlessly, “it’s this or go on the state or start whoring. I guess we do have options.”

Nicci sniffled and rubbed at her face.

Amber picked up the brochure on the ship and made herself read it. It took a lot of time and when she was done, she could not remember a thing she’d just read. She’d hoped it would settle her twisting stomach some, but if anything, the wait and the silence and the sound of Nicci sniffling made her feel even sicker. She folded up the brochure and put it down, talking like she’d never stopped, like she didn’t care, like she was sure. “The best part is, the five years I spend on the planet counts as improved education when I get back. Not as much as a degree would, but some. My salary cap will be raised and I’ll even be eligible for college credit, just like if I’d been in the army.”

She waited. Nicci kept sniffing and wiping.

“Fine,” said Amber, sweeping the papers together in a single stack. “You stay here and have fun with the whoring. I’ll miss you.”

Nicci didn’t call her back as Amber walked down the narrow hall to the room that the sisters had shared since Mary brought baby Nichole home from the insurance company’s birth clinic. Amber put the papers in the drawer with her shirts and socks, then changed out of her funeral clothes and into her work uniform. She went into the bathroom and threw up in the sink. She tried to be as quiet about that as possible and she didn’t feel a lot better when it was done. In the other room, she could hear her baby sister crying again. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and saw a big (fat) unsmiling (mean-eyed) stranger (bitch) who’d bullied her only living relative on the day of their mother’s funeral.

“It had to be said,” whispered Amber. She rinsed her mouth and washed her face and put her hair up. “Sometimes you just have to say the bad stuff.”

She went on out past weeping Nicci and off to work like it didn’t matter. In a way, it didn’t. They simply didn’t have any choice.

2

They called the ship the Pioneer, of course. The launch had originally been scheduled for August 3rd, which surely had some historical significance Amber could not be bothered to look up, but it had been pushed back three times and now was set for January 22nd, and, barring yet another sanction from the United Nations, set in stone. That gave the Bierces a little more than twelve weeks to prepare for the flight, but they only had Bo Peep’s apartment for four. The Manifestors provided housing, but required a signed contract before approval, which in turn required a certificate of medical clearance. They got their exams the third day after requesting one and Nicci passed hers easily. Amber hit an old, familiar snag.

Her tests were all negative, the medico assured her, as though Amber needed assurances. She did not. Her job at the factory took the weekly drug-and-disability tests allowed by law and Amber had seen too many people dismissed, often with a hefty fine for ‘misrepresentation of faculties,’ to ever be tempted by her mother’s stash. No, the problem was what the problem usually was: Her weight.

She wasn’t huge. She had more than one chin and she lost her breath easy when she had to take the stairs, but she got her clothes at the same store Nicci did, just on the lower shelves. So this was a setback, but it wasn’t unexpected and it couldn’t be insurmountable. She just wasn’t that big.

“How much would I have to lose?” Amber asked bluntly, interrupting the medico’s careful dance around the three-letter F-word.

“It isn’t a matter of, well, weight.”

“It isn’t?” she asked, surprised. “Is something wrong with me?”

“Not necessarily. Your blood pressure is, well, on the high end, but normal, and although you show some pre-diabetic conditions, your glucose levels are just fine.”

“How do you have a pre-diabetic condition? Isn’t every healthy person a pre-sick one?”

The medico’s lips pursed slightly.

Amber made herself shut up. She glanced at the nicely-tiled ceiling and then at the pleasant wall-mounted light meant to mimic a curtained window, since the actual view of rundown buildings and garbage-strewn alleys was so deplorable. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not trying to be a bitch, I just really want to go.”

The medico softened slightly, even smiled. No doubt she saw before her an excited, if fat, young pioneeress on the threshold of a lifelong wish and she alone had the power to grant it. Amber let her think whatever she wanted.

“I have to do this,” said Amber. “So just tell me how much I have to lose.”

“I’m really not sure. The problem isn’t just a matter of weight, as I said. It’s a matter of risk. You have to realize that even though your tests all fall within the normal range right now, you’ll be contracted to the colony for five years as, well, as a potential mother. Obesity creates an increased risk for all pregnancies.”

They thought she was obese? Amber rubbed her stomach and scowled. “Okay. I’ll be back,” she said, and went out to the clinic’s waiting area to collect Nicci. She made herself a second appointment for the end of the month, the same day the apartment’s lease expired. She went home, saw a nervous Nicci out the door and on her way to work, then took half the money out of her bank account and got back on the bus.

* * *

Amber knew where he lived, but she went to 61 Street anyway because when Bo Peep moonlighted, which was almost every night these past few years, she did it on 61 and the Six-Ones might be feeling territorial. Sure enough, after standing out in the grey rain for a good half-hour, a kid sidled up and asked who she wanted. She asked for the Candyman. He had a lot of names, and Amber even knew a few, thanks to his long working relationship with her mother, but that was the one that could always find him. The kid went away and another ten minutes passed. Permission came in the form of a low, black car with tinted windows that rolled down just enough for some other kid to tell her where to find him.

The Candyman wasn’t much to look at—a scrawny, toothless man of indeterminate age and race, with a propensity for cheap suits and a swishy way of talking that should have made him a target on these streets. Instead, he was perhaps the one man who could walk freely from 14 East all the way up to Brewer Drive and get nothing but nods from the people he passed. It wasn’t just the drugs. Just what it was, Amber didn’t know, but the drugs made an easy sideline and he was good with them. He rarely met with anyone apart from his own crew and the leisure girls who did the things he liked in exchange for the glow he could give them. But he met with Amber, perhaps just because he’d seen her before, hanging onto Mama’s hand and trying to pretend she was someplace else while Bo Peep begged in her pretty way for the sweet stuff, trying to pretend Mama really meant candy, like the lollipop he gave little Amber on the way out his door.

He admitted her past ten or twelve of his heavily-armed good friends to the squalor of his apartment as if to a royal audience, which she supposed it might be, in a way. He said a few solemn words on the passing of her mother, which was nice of him. And then he got down to business.

“Are you going on the state?” he asked in his mushy, sing-song way. “Candyman can talk around, you bet, find you a prime place to strut. No charge, even. Out of respect. Would you like a soda? Nickels, get Bo Peep’s little girl a soda.”

“No, thank you. I need to lose a lot of weight in the next four weeks,” said Amber. “A lot. And I need to pass a drug-and-disability at the end of it.”

“Mmm-hm.” Candyman leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands. “That does limit our options. Let me think.”

He thought. And then he went into his dingy kitchen, rattled around, and came out with a crinkled paper lunchbag, well-used, but strong enough still to hold whatever it held. He folded the top down three times and pinched the crease sharp with his knobby, stained fingers. “You take one of these in the morning, sweets, when you get up. One twelve hours later, no more and no less. It make you hum around some, you bet,” he said, and tittered. “You say four weeks, uh-huh, you take this three weeks and let the last week go. If you like to tip the bottle, you best be setting it aside for a while or you find you lose all the weight, all at once, and go slithering off in just your soul.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“I like this girl. She all business,” Candyman remarked to one of his good friends and the good friend grunted. “Well, Miss Business, out of respect for your dear departed mama, I’ma give you this for just twenty a shot, mmm-hm. That’s twenty-one days, two shots a day…help me with the higher mathematics here, Snaps.”

“Eight-forty,” rumbled one of his men.

“Just so.” Candyman held out the bag.

Amber didn’t take it. Eight hundred and forty dollars was more than she had on her, but not more than she had. On the other hand, she still had twelve weeks to get through and she didn’t like spending so much of it at the beginning without knowing how it was all going to end. But then again, if she passed her medical exam, she’d be in the Manifestors’ care for most of that time, and after that, it didn’t matter. She meant to put whatever she hadn’t spent in one of the colonist’s accounts, so whatever she had when she left could sit in the Director’s bank growing by half a percent a quarter until she got back. Maybe by then it’d be up to four digits. And when she did come back with her colonist’s pay, eight hundred and forty dollars was going to be pretty small change.

“Give me a little time to put that together,” said Amber. She turned around.

“Ooo, now I really like her. She don’t haggle, she don’t beg, she don’t cozy up other arrangements. She just gets things done,” said Candyman, and he must have gestured because two of his good friends stepped sideways in front of the door. Amber studied them, aware that this might be very bad, as behind her, the Candyman considered.

“How much you got in your pocket?” he asked at last.

Dumb question to answer in a room full of men with guns.

“Five hundred.”

“Mm-hm. Tell you what I’m going to do, because you’re Bo Peep’s little girl and because I like you, I’m going to take that five hundred right now and you gonna give me the rest plus another one-sixty—another even five, you hear me?—the day you take your last shot. You do this like an honest businessman, yeah? And we got no problems.”

She looked at him. “Is there a catch?”

“I do like her,” said Candyman to Snaps. And to Amber again, “Just another business arrangement, nothing bad. Good business. Repeat business, if you understand me, anytime you find yourself in the market. You just let Candyman take care of you, we gonna get along just fine.”

“I can agree to that,” said Amber, who had no intention of either buying his products or selling her body. She doubted he’d follow her offworld to complain about it.

Candyman smiled at her, but his eyes turned cold and somehow older—the eyes of a crocodile, half-sunk in swamp and too damned close to shore. “Whether or not you can is not what I’m waiting to hear, Miss Business.”

“Sorry,” said Amber, and unlike the nurse, the apology did not soften up the Candyman in the slightest. “I mean I will.” And she put out her hand for him to shake.

He looked at it. His friends looked at it. They all looked at each other. Some of them laughed, but it was good, honest laughter.

“Business all the way,” marveled Candyman. He shook with her. His hand was soft and bony at the same time, with too much skin for its little size, and abrasive calluses on the fingerpads. He did not release her right away. “You gonna find I’m a man of my word, despite what you might be thinking, and that can be good or bad depending on how you want to play this out.”

“I came to you for help,” said Amber. “That’s how I’m playing it.”

“Mm-hm.” He opened his hand and let hers go. “I knew your mama,” he said, giving her the lunchbag. “I knew her about as well as she let anyone know her, if you feel me, and if you don’t mind my saying, you not a whole lot like her.”

She knew. And she knew it probably wasn’t a compliment, but she took it as one.

* * *

She took her lunchbag home and put it in Mama’s room without looking at it. Then she cleaned house. Ice cream, frozen pizzas, peanut butter, all the nuke-and-eat dinners in the freezer and the just-add-hamburger boxes from the cupboard—opened or unopened, it all went into a garbage bag and straight out to the dump-bin behind the building. If it wasn’t here, she wouldn’t think about it; if it was, she’d probably eat it all, just to have something to do. It wasn’t until much later that night, after Nicci was in bed and Amber sat alone in Mama’s room that she opened up the thin, stained paper and had her first look at forty-one pre-loaded needles. She tried not to think about how many times they’d been used when she pushed the first one in.

She didn’t even have enough time to wonder when it was going to hit before it hit. She didn’t sleep that night. She didn’t sleep much at all for the next twenty-one days, but she hummed all right. Sometimes her heart raced hard enough that she made herself sit down with the telephone on her lap and her finger on the emergency-response button, just waiting for the last reason to push it, but she got through it.

She lost her job, but not for the shots. She wasn’t sure how they found out about Manifest Destiny, but they must have, because in spite of her ‘recent increase in enthusiasm and productivity’ at work, they felt that, regrettably, she had ceased to envision a future with the company. They did not offer to send her last paycheck and she did not ask. She considered herself lucky they hadn’t taken her to court for breach of occupational contract.

Jobless, she counted days by the mornings when she shot up and nights the same way. Otherwise, there was no time, no sense of its passage, no sense of change in herself, only sleepless nights and blurry days and gradually loosening clothes.

She paid the Candyman his money the morning of her last injection. He told her she looked good, reminded her of their future business arrangements, said he’d see her around. She did, once or twice, but only at a distance.

She made her appointment at the clinic on time after sleeping nearly two days straight through. She looked and felt like home-brewed shit in her opinion, but she didn’t have the same medico and the new one didn’t remark on her appearance beyond voicing some concern that if the records were accurate, Amber appeared to have lost fifty-seven pounds since the last examination.

“Mistakes happen,” said Amber. “Do I pass?”

The medico took some measurements. He flipped through some papers. Then he excused himself. Amber waited for a few seconds, then eased the door latch silently down and opened it just a crack. She could hear her medico down at the nurses’ station, conferring with whoever else was there in low, urgent tones.

“—not sure what to tell her,” he was saying.

“How old is she?”

“Twenty-four, but she’s a big girl. I don’t think the—”

“She clean?”

“What? Yeah, she’s fine other than the—”

“Pass her.”

“Are you sure she’s going even going to fit in the Sleeper? They don’t exactly make those things in plus sizes.”

“Did you look at her home address? She’s asking for her clearance this early, it’s because she wants to move into the housing those nuts are offering. And she is not getting any bigger over there, I guarantee it.”

“I don’t know…”

“Seriously, I have to spell this out for you? The Director has God knows how many investors convinced that this deep-space disaster of his is a five-year swinger’s party. If they show up with their money and find a fucking weiner roast, they’re going to make him very unhappy and he will make his underlings unhappy and that shit will roll downhill until it hits us. Who cares how big she is? Someone will be into that. Pass her.”

Amber got her health clearance. She took it to the local branch of Manifest Destiny and got a room for her and Nicci to share at the compound for thirty dollars a week and a thumbprint. It took just a few hours to load up their things and sign out of the apartment. She left all the big stuff behind for the super to steal and got on the shuttle that took them to the busport that took them to their new, temporary home. It was a nine-hour drive with seventeen other hopeful colonists and nobody did much talking. That night, in their new beds and their old sheets, Nicci cried. Amber slept.

* * *

Time came back.

She had eight weeks to kill with nothing to do. She went to all the seminars the Manifestors offered. She took a class in agrarian infrastructure, and another in canning, figuring they’d be useful skills to have on the new planet. She went to the gym every day, but gained back five pounds. She would have gone back to the Candyman for another thirty pounds’ worth of needles if she had the money, but she didn’t, so fuck it. Once the ship took off, it would be too late for the Director to hang out his No Fat Chicks sign.

Finally, their boarding orders. They were boarding the corporates first, the gold class second, and the families third, in alphabetical order, so Amber and Nicci were scheduled for eight in the morning on January 17th. There was an orientation lecture on boarding procedure. Amber went. Nicci stayed home and cried.

On the last day, Amber packed. They were allowed to bring whatever they wanted for free, provided it fit in one of the standard Fleet-issued duffel bags. Anything other than that, they charged for. Amber put in the three spare colonist’s uniforms first, leaving only the one she’d be wearing for boarding. Then she rolled up a few sweaters, some jeans, socks, underwear, her favorite tee and, with what little space she had left, the most useful study material from the seminars, and two coffee cups. She stared at it for a while. She packed Nicci’s duffel for her, rummaging through the apartment stuff for more than two hours to find the shoebox with their photos. She removed the pictures where Bo Peep was too obviously strung out and put the rest in Nicci’s duffel bag. Then she cried, but she did it quietly in the bathroom. It was almost morning, almost time.

It was almost over.

“Here we go,” muttered Amber. She dried her eyes and switched out the light, saying, with absolutely no sense of premonition, “Plymouth or bust.”

Coming Soon…

The Last Hour of Gann

By R. Lee Smith

Table of Contents

Dedication

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

AMBER