A Better World

CHAPTER 7

It had been a lousy day, filled with frustration and burned coffee. But it got better once Cooper landed on the fourteenth moon of Saturn.

“Enceladus,” his son said, “is the most likely place for life in the solar system. It’s got lots of water and carbon and nitrogen.”

“Sounds like just the place to search for little green men.”

“Yes,” Todd said. “But we have to secure the station walls first. It’s negative three hundred degrees outside.”

“Yikes.” Cooper took one side of the blanket and draped it over the back of a chair, knotting the fringe to hold it in place. “We better not dawdle then. Special K?” He held out the other end to his daughter, who stretched it across the living room. He and Todd dragged the couch over to form one wall, then draped another blanket over the top.

His son surveyed the fort, his lips crinkled in a scowl. “We need a better ceiling.”

“On it,” Cooper said. He crawled from under the sagging blanket, went to the kitchen, and dug in the everything drawer for a roll of duct tape. On tiptoes, he wrapped a loop around the light fixture on the ceiling fan. Then he pinched the center of the blanket, tugged it up, and wrapped tape around it. “How’s that, Captain?”

“Awesome!”

He smiled and crawled back inside. The overhead light glowed through the blanket in pinhole stars. The tent was just tall enough now for him to sit cross-legged in the center, watching his children continue to build. Todd worked in broad strokes, jamming cushions upright as walls, tugging the couch to narrow the entrance. Kate focused on the details, closing seams and carefully smoothing folds. Making order. It was her way.

Of course it is. She’s gifted. Her world is all about patterns.

With the thought came an involuntary shiver. She wasn’t just an abnorm; she was tier one. Of the four million children born each year in America, only a couple of thousand had that sort of power. According to the law, they were taken from their parents and sent to specialized governmental schools. The academies were an open secret, known about but not discussed. After all, the number of tier ones was small enough that the academies didn’t impact most people. Like concentration camps in Germany, or internment camps after Pearl Harbor, or CIA prisons in Africa, the academies were a national atrocity it was easy enough to ignore.

But Cooper had been to one. He’d seen the way children were isolated and abused, how the teachers turned them on each other. How the faculty charted their secrets and constructed their greatest fears. The academies were brainwashing centers, pure and simple. Cooper had listened while Director Norridge calmly explained the process: “Essentially, we take the negative formative experiences that all children experience and manufacture them according to psychological profiles and at a dramatically higher rate. From their youth we teach them that they cannot trust one another. That other abnorms are weak, cruel, and small.”

The powerlessness he’d felt in that moment had been equaled only by his desire to bounce the director’s head off the desk until one or the other cracked. He’d managed to hold his temper, but he’d made a pledge at that moment: his daughter would never end up in an academy. Ever.

He ruffled her hair. She looked up over her shoulder at him. “Daddy?”

“Yeah, baby?”

“Will the Martians be nice?”

“Well, we’re not on Mars, honey, so they won’t be Martians.”

“What will they be?”

“Toddster?”

“Enceladians.”

“Will the Enceladians be nice?”

“Sure. It’s too cold to be mean.” He heard a sound, peeked out a slit in the blankets. “Actually, I see one now. It looks like a girl Enceladian to me.”

Natalie’s feet appeared in the door of the tent, then her knees as she squatted, and finally her head. “Can I come in?”

“What do you think, guys? A little cross-species cooperation? Thanksgiving on Enceladus?” The children looked back and forth at one another, then Kate nodded somberly.

His ex-wife grinned at that, said, “Phew. I’ve always wanted to be in a spaceship.” She wriggled in beside him.

“It’s a space station, Mom.”

“Sorry. Does it have a tub? Because it’s time for a little space girl to take her bath.”

“No!”

“Yup. Come on.”

“Can we leave the space station up?”

“Of course,” Natalie said. “What else would we do with the living room?”

Together they got the kids moving, went through the nightly dance of snacks and baths and toothbrushing. The whole ritual was infused with a painful sweetness that Cooper lapped up.

Bright bathroom light reflecting off white tile. Silly songs. Superhero pajamas. Kate with toothpaste dripping down her chin. An impromptu dance party in the bedroom, Kate spazzing out, Todd a little self-conscious until Cooper chased him around and tickled him. Books read. Bargains struck. Books reread.

Then he was turning off the light on his daughter’s side of the room and tucking the blankets around her tightly. Todd, almost ten and allowed to stay up to read, was already lost in a sci-fi novel and grunted a goodnight as Cooper kissed his forehead. He walked out of the room and closed the door behind him, feeling that mingled lightness and loss that attended the kids going down.

He descended the stairs and wandered into the kitchen. No Natalie. Nor in the playroom. The living room was dominated by the fort they’d made, the couch pulled out of position, coffee table pressed against the wall, duct tape dangling from the light fixture to the blanket. “Nat?”

“In the space station.”

He laughed, crawled inside. His ex-wife sat cross-legged in the center of the tent. Cooper didn’t know a lot about women’s fashion, but he was pretty sure yoga pants were one of the great inventions of the last twenty years. Natalie had a bottle of wine open and two glasses. “They down?”

“Todd’s reading.”

“Where are we?”

“Enceladus,” he said. “The fourteenth moon of Saturn. Or so our eldest tells me.”

“That kid is crazy.”

“Absolutely nutty,” Cooper agreed. He took the glass she offered, took a long swallow.

“And how are you?”

Something he’d always loved about Natalie, her words and her meaning were more aligned than most anyone he’d ever met. It was a cousin to bluntness, but without the swagger; she wasn’t in anyone’s face, had nothing to prove. She just said what she meant. For someone with his gift, that was a wonderful relief.

He took her question the way she meant it, sincerely. “What do you call it when you’re either swimming or drowning, but not sure which yet?”

“Treading water?”

“I guess.”

“What’s bothering you?”

He hesitated. It had been three and a half years since the divorce. They were friends, and co-parented well, but it wasn’t fair to unload about his day. That was for married couples. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Nick,” she said, gesturing at the tent walls, the blankets breathing softly in a draft. “You’re safe. We’re on Enceladus. Talk to me.”

He laughed at that. Then he started and found it hard to stop. He wanted to share the good stuff, the walk down the drive to the West Wing, the feeling of stepping into the Oval Office, the thrill of seeing his words, his thoughts, translated into something that showed up on the evening news. But those parts were inseparable from the conference table battles that fed his growing frustration.

“Keevers and the rest, even Clay, they’re stuck in old-world thinking. So focused on the day-to-day that they’re missing the big picture.” He laughed without humor. “They’re honestly worried about how things will look come election time. And I’m sitting there saying, ‘Guys, shouldn’t we be worrying that there won’t be an election?’ ”

“It’s that bad?”

Cooper paused. Took a swallow of wine. Nodded.

“Then fix it.”

“Huh?”

“Fix it.” She shrugged. “You’ve got the ear of the president of the United States. Use it.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Was it simpler when you were hunting your own kind for Equitable Services?”

“No.”

“All your life you’ve been fighting for a world where our children won’t need to be afraid. I know the last year has been tough on you. But if things are as bad as that, then you need to gear up, soldier.”

He looked at her, this exceptional woman he had loved for more than a decade, through their own ups and downs. Loved passionately once; then, when his gift and his job came between them, loved with respect even as they decided to live separate lives. “Gear up?”

“Yes. And one other thing.” She set her wine glass down. It was a calculated move, carefully considered; he could see it in the play of her muscles, and the way her lips were slightly parted, and the way she leaned forward as she crawled over to—whoa.

Kiss him.

Full and firm, lips soft against his, her red-wine tongue dancing into his mouth. The feeling of it was at once familiar and novel, the electric brush of her upper arm against his as she leaned in, and the smell of her in his nostrils.

She held the kiss long enough to make it clear that it wasn’t a friendly gesture, a peck between old lovers. When she broke it, she looked into his eyes and said, “I’m proud of you.” Then she picked up her wine glass and crawled for the exit. Over her shoulder, she said, “Fix it.”

Huh.

Huh.

Huh.