Tomorrow's Kin

CHAPTER 16

S plus 6 years

“There is mouses down there!” Colin Jenner said.

“No,” his father said in that slow, frowny way that Colin hated. Jason hated it, too. “Not here.”

“Yes.” Colin pointed at the ground. “Little baby mouses!”

His father tugged at both boys’ hands so hard that even Jason was almost lifted off his feet.

Daddy hadn’t wanted to bring them on this walk. He never wanted to bring them anyplace. He sat in the living room and stared at the television or sometimes just at the wall, which was dusty and had a big spiderweb up in the corner by the ceiling. Colin didn’t think there was a spider in it, but he wasn’t sure. He hoped there was. Spiders were interesting. Sometimes Daddy would get up and cook or wash their clothes, and sometimes Jason would do it. Jason was way over six and went to real school, not just preschool, and so he could do things like that.

But today Jason had begged and pleaded, and Daddy and Jason and Colin got in the car and drove to Daddy’s swamp, which would have been exciting except for Daddy, who looked unhappy to be there. More unhappy.

The swamp was squishy underfoot and Colin’s boots made a nice splurgly sound each time he pulled a foot out of mud. There was so much to hear! To look at, too—frogs and bugs and the purple flowers Daddy hated and Colin sort of liked. But looking wasn’t as exciting as hearing. It never was.

But after just a little time Daddy said he was tired. They left the swamp and walked the trail to the parking lot, with its broken-off sign that nobody ever fixed: REARDON WETLANDS PRESER. Colin pulled away from his father’s hand, planted his muddy boots, and pointed again. “Baby mouses are down there!”

“I told you, Colin, there are no mice here. Not anymore, thanks to your grandmother’s alien ‘friends.’”

“I hear them! Baby mouses!”

His father grimaced, knelt, and put his hands on Colin’s shoulders. “Say ‘mice.’ One mouse, two mice. Look, I explained all this to you, remember? You’re old enough to begin to understand.”

“I’m five now,” Colin said, in case Daddy forgot. He seemed to forget Colin and Jason a lot.

“Yes, five. A big boy. So you can remember that all the house mice and field mice, all the ones like those in your picture book, are gone. They all got sick and died. A different kind of mouse, the deer mouse, might come and live here, but they haven’t spread this far yet. And even when they do, you couldn’t hear the babies way underground.”

It was the most words Daddy had spoken in a long time, but they weren’t true words. Colin stamped his foot. “There is mices down there.”

Ryan Jenner stood, took both sons’ hands and started toward the car. Behind them, a deer mouse sped from the cover of brush and disappeared into a tiny hole in the ground.

Daddy was wrong. Colin did understand about the mice. Grandma had explained it all on Skype. That was a while ago and Colin didn’t remember all of it, but Jason did and he explained it, everything that had happened when Colin wasn’t even born yet. Aliens had come from out of the stars, and Grandma and all the other scientists had helped them to not get sick. Only, after the aliens went away, a lot of mice died, like Jason’s hamster last Christmas, which was really scary because Pockets had been all stiff and cold. Grandma promised that she, Colin, Jason, and Daddy wouldn’t die for a long time. Mommy was already dead but that didn’t count because Colin couldn’t remember her and Jason could only remember a little. She’d died of cancer, which was different than what had killed mice. That was sad. Then birds and owls and even wolves died because there weren’t enough mice to eat. Then there were too many bugs because there weren’t enough birds to eat them.

Somehow the whole thing ended up hurting farmers and bread and fruit and money, although Colin didn’t really understand that part and neither did Jason. But it was the reason people got poor and Daddy lost his job and the car was so old and the porch steps were broken and Colin was never, ever to tell anybody that they had food in the cellar and guns in the house. Not ever.

The really confusing part, though, was the aliens from the star. Grandma said they were good and hadn’t meant to hurt any people or mice. They left directions for building a spaceship, a real one not like Colin’s toys, which sounded really exciting except that the important people who were in charge of the world didn’t have enough money to build it. And a big storm wrecked part of the spaceship, so they stopped. Grandma’s job was to tell people that the spaceship should get built again and that the aliens were good.

But Daddy said the aliens were bad. Really, really bad. They killed people and mice and wrecked something called “the economy,” which Colin didn’t understand, and “the ecology,” which he did because Daddy used to talk about it all the time, before he started staring at the wall or the TV. Ecology was how everything needed to eat everything else. Daddy said the aliens were even worse than the purple flowers.

So Colin and Jason didn’t know who to believe. Grandma and Daddy were both scientists, who were the smartest people in the world. Someday Colin was going to be a scientist, too, although Jason wanted to be an astronaut instead. When Colin was a scientist, everything would all be clear.

Meanwhile, he just listened. To everything. Nobody, he sometimes thought, knew how much he heard.

“Daddy,” he said as they walked from the car to the broken porch steps, “the trees are not happy.”

“Don’t I know it,” Daddy said.

Daddy didn’t understand. Grandma, on Skype, didn’t understand. Even Jason didn’t understand. Jason didn’t hear what Colin did.

On her birthday, Marianne saw a picture of herself on the cover of a news magazine.

She stood in line at the supermarket in Barnsville, a Canadian town west of Toronto. The town was small, the supermarket barely deserved the name, the magazine rack held only three magazines, which were a dying commodity anyway. Two were American, and Time had pictures of her, Harrison, Ahmed Rafat, and others who’d researched aboard the Embassy. The photos ringed big red letters: ARCHITECTS OF THE SPORE PLAGUE: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

Marianne’s fingers trembled as she put the magazine in her basket, along with coffee, milk, bread, cheese, and dish detergent. The clerk smiled, took her money, and did not seem to match her with the photo. At home, Marianne collapsed on her sofa and read the article and its many sidebars.

“Home” was this small rented bungalow ever since Stubbins had brought her here two and a half years ago. Canada was far less rabid about the damage the Denebs had caused to her ecology than was the United States—but then, when wasn’t Canada less rabid? Something about the United States seemed to provide a fertile medium for culturing hate groups, irrational scapegoats, mass shootings, and the blame game. When Jonah Stubbins had tried to buy a TV station in the United States, there was suddenly none available. When he’d tried to buy broadcast-frequency bandwidth from the FCC, his application had been denied. A few cable companies welcomed him, but they were small and local. To get the airtime he wanted, Stubbins bought a Canadian station, from which he broadcast illegally to the United States. “I’m a goddamn Tokyo Rose,” he’d said to reporters, but not to Marianne. She’d heard about it anyway.

The Time piece, a series of articles, began with an essay by Hugo Soltis, a popular columnist known for his anti-Deneb views:

Marianne read with growing anger. To say that the scientists on the Embassy had “helped to bring this about”—how could a once-reputable news magazine even print that? Or blame the Denebs for failing to warn humanity about what they themselves didn’t know? Or that the Denebs were aliens, when all evidence said they were human? How?

The rest of the articles were more balanced. One discussed the chemistry and side effects of Calminex. One reported on the four spaceships still under construction, including the funding and engineering problems of building an unknown structure powered by unknown physics to specs dictated by an unknown race. One article examined the world’s economy, slowly recovering. One explored the ecological shifts from the mouse die-off: which animals were filling the vacated niche of fast-multiplying omnivores, how plants were adjusting.

And one traced the present activities and whereabouts of key Embassy research staff, those who had stayed until the very end.

Dr. Ahmed Rafat, geneticist. On staff at GlaxoSmithKline in London.

Penelope Hodgson, lab assistant. Housewife in Tempe, Arizona.

Dr. Ann Potter, physician. Retired from practice, living in Washington, DC.

Robert Chavez, lab assistant, working at the University of California at Berkeley.

Lisa Guiterrez, genetics counselor, changed her name to Lisa Garland, living and working in Chicago. She deeply regrets her involvement with the aliens, saying—

Marianne skipped to the last paragraphs.

Dr. Harrison Rice, immunologist and Nobel Laureate, living in New York City and working at Columbia University, reportedly on brain anomalies in mice.

Dr. Marianne Jenner, evolutionary geneticist whose son Noah was allegedly kidnapped by aliens, living in Barnsville, Ontario, Canada. She creates content for the JS Network, owned by Jonah Stubbins, which feeds pro-Deneb programs and speeches and scientific statistics to American television and the Internet around the globe.

How had they found her? And how much danger was she in now? God, she’d thought that was all over and done with. She hadn’t seen her children or grandchildren in two years, settling for Skype “visits” so that she didn’t lead murderous nut jobs to Elizabeth or Ryan or the kids. She lived in Canada with a false passport and visa, both courtesy of Stubbins’s huge and faintly illegal empire.

Maybe she needed yet another name, another passport, another place to live. Maybe she should leave the house right now and check into a motel. The article hadn’t included her alias. But maybe the motel clerk would recognize her picture. Maybe she was being incredibly paranoid.

No. Sissy was dead because Marianne had not been paranoid enough. If she hadn’t given those speeches for the foundation… No. No use thinking that way. It didn’t help.

She picked up her cell to call Jonah Stubbins. Ordinarily they had very little contact; working for the same goal had not made his fake-folksy persona any less grating. This, however, was not “ordinarily.” At least, over the phone she did not have to wonder if he was wearing any of his pheromone products, or if they were affecting her.

Before the call could go through, someone pounded on her door. “Marianne? Open up—I know you’re in there!”

Something was wrong with Daddy. Jason said so, but Colin knew it even before that. He didn’t need Jason to tell him everything! He wasn’t a baby.

“Daddy?” Jason said. Daddy sat in his big red chair with the tall back, Colin standing on one side of him and Jason on the other. Daddy hadn’t moved all morning, and when Colin had gone to bed last night, Daddy had been sitting in the chair just like that. He smelled bad. He looked straight at the wall so Colin looked at it, too, to see if maybe there was a spider on it. There wasn’t.

“Daddy!” Jason said again. Daddy didn’t look at him, even though Jason said it loud. Jason shook his arm, and then Daddy did look at him. “It’s lunchtime now.”

“Yes,” Daddy said.

Colin said helpfully, “We had cereal for breakfast.”

Jason put his face right up close to Daddy’s. “You have to make lunch now. We want soup. I’m not allowed to turn on the stove, remember?”

“Yes,” Daddy said, but at first he didn’t get up. Then, slowly, he pushed himself out of the chair and walked into the kitchen. He walked really slow, picking up his feet only a little bit.

Colin scampered after him. “Daddy, are you sick? You should go to bed if you’re sick.”

Daddy started to cry. He did it with no noise at all, just big fat tears rolling down his face. He still smelled bad. Colin got scared. But Jason said sharply, “Daddy! Lunch!”

Daddy heated the soup. Colin wasn’t very hungry, after all.

Marianne flung open the door to her bungalow; there was no mistaking that voice. Tim Saunders stood on the porch.

Marianne had not seen him since Albuquerque. Absolved of all charges, Tim had disappeared. He had not even thanked her or Stubbins for the high-priced lawyer or the car registered to one of Stubbins’s corporations. Stubbins had grunted, “Ungrateful bastard. And abandoning you—he’s interested mostly in keeping his own hide safe from the rest of them hate-mongers.” Marianne knew better. Tim had known that Marianne was safe under Stubbins’s professional protection, and the lack of thank-yous had not been ingratitude. Tim had disappeared into his grief for Sissy, and even the sight of Marianne would have been too much to bear.

Two and a half years had not changed him much. The long lean body stood in that same relaxed-alert way; the eyes in his tanned face burned just as blue. He was—what, now? Forty? Faint wrinkles at the corners of those amazing eyes, but only faint. “Marianne,” he said, and his voice had that same gravelly depth.

“How did you find me?”

“Time magazine. The bastards. Are you okay? Can I come in?”

“I’m okay,” she lied.

“Uh-huh.” He shut and locked the door, prowled around the living room trying windows, glanced down the hallway of the little bungalow. “You can’t stay here.”

“Why? What do you know?”

“I don’t know anything, if you mean anything definite. But this place is about as secure as a gazebo.” He pronounced it “gays-bo,” and Marianne didn’t correct him. “You work for Stubbins, right? Why didn’t he give you a safer house?”

“I didn’t want a fortress. I don’t use my own name. We thought—Tim, do you really think those people who… that group from Albuquerque will come after me?”

“Well, four of them went to prison. But no, I don’t think they will. Might have trouble getting into Canada, anyway. But there are plenty of other alien-hate groups, even here. NCWAK is getting stronger all the time.

No Contact with Alien Killers. They were the one that had blown up Branson’s partly built spaceship.

Tim said, “You’re outed now and Stubbins ought to take better care of you.”

“I was just going to call him when you showed up.”

“And I’m the first to find you?”

“You are.”

He gave her his old grin, and something turned over in Marianne’s chest. No, God no, not after all this time.

Tim said, “You’re going to hire me for your bodyguard again. Or Stubbins is. I see the old son of a bitch brought out another perfume. Makes you want to like strangers.”

“Not exactly. But Tim, about the bodyguard issue—I don’t think—”

“You got any coffee, Marianne? I could use some coffee. I been driving up here fast and furious.”

Her cell rang: Stubbins. At the same time, a TV van pulled into the driveway. Instantly Tim was at the window, pulling the blinds closed, checking his holster.

“Marianne?” Stubbins said on the phone. “I just saw this damn article, and somebody’s head is going to roll ’cause I didn’t know about it before now. Looks like we need to move you again. And I think a bodyguard would be a good idea.”

Marianne closed her eyes. “Let’s talk about it, Jonah. But first, there’s something else I want you to do.”

“What’s that?”

She glanced at Tim. He was pulling open cupboards in the kitchenette, presumably looking for coffee, but Marianne knew he heard every word.

She said into the phone, “It isn’t just me who was named in that article. I want you to put a bodyguard on Harrison Rice, too. He won’t allow it, but you can get one to just sort of follow him around, right? He not only worked with the Denebs right up till the end, but he’s working now at Columbia on the hearing impairment in children. That’s a double reason for…” For what? Would someone really harm Harrison because he was trying to understand what had happened to a generation of kids? No. She was being paranoid. People’s thinking wasn’t that twisted.

“Yeah,” Stubbins said. “Good thinking.”

Tim smiled at her. “You got sugar someplace?”

Stubbins was efficient. Within two hours a woman arrived at Marianne’s door, high heels clicking up the walk past the two TV vans and two Internet reporters camped on the sidewalk. The woman, who did not offer her name and who had the bloodless demeanor of a robot, delivered papers and instructions. She made a phone call to Stubbins about Tim, then nodded at Marianne. “You can keep him.”

Tim gave the woman his lazy, hyper-charged grin. She did not seem affected. She said, “One hour to pack, Dr. Jenner,” and clicked her way back to her car, ignoring shouted questions from the reporters.

Exactly an hour later, a sleek black car backed into the driveway. Marianne, wearing a large hat that frustrated pictures, raised the garage door and the black car backed in as far as Marianne’s battered Chevy would permit. Tim loaded suitcases into the trunk and they both climbed into the back seat. The windows were opaque and the driver blank-faced. Another man rode beside him.

Tim nodded professional approval. “Stubbins isn’t taking any chances.”

Marianne said nothing. She felt exposed, ridiculous, chagrined at being even more in Stubbins’s debt, raw from other emotions she didn’t want to examine too closely. She didn’t look at Tim.

The reporters didn’t give chase, which meant either they knew they were outclassed or she wasn’t a big enough story. She hoped it was the latter. Tim, who had driven the entire previous night, fell asleep. She remembered that he had always had that ability, and then tried not to remember anything else.

The car deposited them at an apartment building in Toronto. The driver handed Marianne apartment keys to 3B. She said, “Does Jonah Stubbins just keep a whole series of apartments around the world for emergencies like this?” Because it was inconceivable that Stubbins himself lived here, in this respectable but slightly crumbling building from the last century, in this respectable but slightly crumbling neighborhood of a Canadian city. Neither the driver nor the bodyguard answered her. They unloaded the suitcases and drove off.

“Well,” Tim said as he carried in her cases, “home sweet home.”

Marianne set down her laptop case. The apartment, not as big as her abandoned bungalow in Barnesville, had two bedrooms. They opened off a living-dining-kitchen area with a large wall screen. The simple furnishings looked neither old nor brand new, as if the apartment had been put together a few years ago and used occasionally since then. A coffee stain blossomed on the arm of the beige sofa; sheets and blankets were folded neatly on the unmade beds; the few pictures on the wall were generic landscapes. The kitchen cupboards held six plates, six glasses, six cups, six sets of cutlery.

She felt a sudden, unbidden longing for another home—not for her bright little house near the college where she’d taught and researched up until seven years ago, but for the big, messy, noisy house where she had raised Elizabeth and Ryan and Noah. Children’s artwork on the fridge, toys underfoot, SpaghettiOs, cereal boxes with prizes inside.

“What’s wrong, Marianne?” Tim said.

“Nothing.”

“Like hell. Are you scared? You’re safe enough here, you know. That magazine will only be on the stands a week, and for that time I’ll do the shopping and you stay inside and do… whatever it is you do. It’ll be okay.”

“I know.”

“Is it Rice? You worried about him? Are you two still in touch?”

Tim’s gaze was intent; his tone sounded like more than a simple request for information. Marianne said, “We’re not in touch.”

“Uh-huh.”

Her cell rang, saving her from trying to interpret his two maddening syllables. Stubbins again. All their calls went through heavily encrypted satellite links. She answered as Tim turned away to open the fridge, which was empty.

Tim said, “You got a pencil and paper, Marianne? I better make a list. Oh, and money. I hope you got either money or a new credit card, ’cause I don’t.”

Stubbins said, “You arrived all right.” It wasn’t a question. “Now, about that new Internet content you’re writing about my ship…”

Tim brought back groceries, including two bottles of wine and takeout Thai for dinner. Marianne drank two glasses of pinot noir, trying to calm her jitters, since talking rationally to herself hadn’t worked all that well.

Tim poured her a third glass. “We got to talk.”

“About what?”

“You don’t look at me.”

She was startled that he had noticed.

“Not directly,” he said, “not ever. Why not? Do you want a different bodyguard?”

Yes.

No.

“Because if looking at me brings back too many memories about Albuquerque and about Sissy, I get that. You can ask Stubbins for somebody else.”

“It isn’t that.” She drank off half the wine.

“Then what is it, Marianne?”

She didn’t answer but did turn her head to look at him directly—See? I can do it? That was a mistake. She couldn’t see her own face, but…

Tim let out a long breath. Of course he would know, he probably already knew, he was nothing if not experienced with women.

He stood up, came around the table, pulled her to her feet and kissed her.

Marianne pulled away. “No, no… we can’t…”

“Why not?” He didn’t let her go. His touch electrified and soothed her, both at once. How long had it been since anyone had touched her? Since Harrison. Two and a half years.

He said, “You carrying a torch for Rice?”

“No.” She wasn’t, not anymore. Banked embers.

“I grieved on Sissy for nearly two years,” Tim said, “and then I hated myself because I stopped. Because I could stop. I thought it meant I was a shallow prick, or hadn’t really loved her. But it don’t mean that, Marianne. It’s just life going on, you know?”

That speech finished her. She hadn’t expected insight from him, or sensitivity—not even sensitivity expressed in clichés. Why not? After all, Sissy had loved him, and Sissy had been nobody’s fool. His scent, masculine and heady, confused her. Still, she made one more try.

“I’m so much older than you—”

Tim laughed. “Who the hell cares?” He kissed her again, and then she was lost completely, drowning in him—no, not drowning, that implied something passive, she was rushing toward him, toward that blue gaze and that long hard body, rushing into the bedroom and the joy that blotted out, for a time anyway, all memory and all regret.

CHAPTER 17

S plus 6 years

For three whole days Daddy didn’t get out of his tall red chair hardly at all, and there was no more milk left or cereal or cheese for sandwiches. Jason and Colin hadn’t had any baths because they weren’t supposed to get in the bathtub without an adult. The upstairs toilet was plugged up but the downstairs one still worked. However, Colin could smell the toilet from his bedroom and he didn’t like it. His bedroom window was too stuck to open. The boys stood in the front hall and discussed all this in whispers.

“I think Daddy’s sick,” Jason said.

“I think he’s mad at us,” Colin said. “He frowns all the time and he won’t talk.”

“If he’s sick,” Jason said, “he should go to a doctor. But if he’s mad, he should say why. It’s not fair.”

Colin nodded. It wasn’t fair. When you were mad at somebody you were supposed to tell them why, using your indoor voice, and then ask what everybody could do to make things better. That’s what Colin’s preschool teacher, Ms. Rydder, said. Colin wished he was back in preschool, but it was still summer. Anyway, he couldn’t go to school until he had a bath.

Jason said, “I told him he should go to the doctor.”

“You did?” Jason was brave. Colin was a little scared of Daddy now. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I wanna go home.’”

“But he is home.”

“I know. It doesn’t make sense.”

Colin stood on one foot, but that didn’t help. Outside, a tree said something in the rain, but that didn’t help either.

Jason said, sounding just like Daddy—the old Daddy—“Stop fidgeting, Colin. We have to think what to do!”

Colin tried to think, but nothing came. He said, “Daddy’s talking now.”

They tiptoed into the living room. Daddy sat in his chair, talking quiet but not so quiet that Colin didn’t hear him: “I wanna go home. I wanna go home.” It made Colin feel spooky.

Jason pulled him back into the hall. “Okay,” he said, “I know what to do. We’re going to call Grandma!”

Colin frowned. “Daddy said that Grandma is doing something bad.”

“She’s not. Don’t say that again! Grandma will help us. She’s Daddy’s mommy, and mommies help when people are sick.”

Colin, having no experience with mommies, thought about this. “Okay. But do you know how to do Skype?” Daddy always set up their Skype calls with Grandma and then left the room. Sometimes it seemed to Colin that Daddy didn’t like Grandma. But if she was his mommy… The whole thing was too confusing.

Jason said, “I think I can do Skype. Maybe.”

He could. Colin, watching Jason at the computer, was full of admiration. When Colin was going to real school, he’d be able to do all these things, too.

The computer made the ringing-phone sound. “You did it, Jase!”

“Hello?” Grandma’s voice said, and there she was on the screen. When Colin had been little, he’d thought that Grandma was inside the computer, but now he knew better. She was far away, and very busy, maybe or maybe not doing something bad.

“Hi, Grandma,” Jason said. “Can you see me? Colin is here, too. You have to come to our house. Daddy is acting all weird. I think maybe he’s really sick.”

“And the toilet’s broken,” Colin said, in case Grandma could help with that, too.

Grandma made a sharp, high sound. “Did Daddy fall down? Is he breathing?”

“Yeah, he’s breathing good,” Jason said. “He’s sitting in his red chair. For three days. And he says he has to go home, but he is home. He doesn’t know I’m calling you. Should I call 911?”

A man appeared on the screen behind Grandma. He had really blue eyes. He was buttoning up a shirt. “Jason, I’m Tim, your grandmother’s friend. Are you okay, son? Are you alone in the house?”

“I’m here,” Colin said indignantly.

The man smiled. “So you are. Marianne, where are they?”

“Basville, in New York State. Between Rochester and Syracuse. Ryan moved after Connie died.”

“We can be there in five hours.”

Grandma said, “Don’t go out of the house, Jason, Colin. We’re coming as fast as we can, okay?”

“Okay,” Jason said. “What color is your car?”

The man smiled. “Blue.”

“I like blue,” Colin said, so as to not be left out of the conversation.

Grandma said, “Do you have your father’s cell phone?”

“No,” Jason said. “But I can get it from his bedroom.”

“You do that, Jason. Keep it turned on because I’m going to call you a lot. Meanwhile, you boys just sit and watch TV, okay?”

“Yes!” Colin said. Usually they weren’t allowed much TV. Maybe this would be good. Maybe Grandma would get Daddy well again. Maybe Tim would take Jason and Colin to the swamp in his blue car. Maybe everything would be all right.

Marianne called Jason every twenty minutes on Ryan’s cell, trying to keep the conversation light: “What are you watching on TV?” “Is that a good cartoon?” “What is the Hero of Heroes doing now?”

“They’re fine,” Tim said. He drove expertly along the New York State Thruway, after a too-long delay at the border crossing caused by prolonged computer checks on Tim’s guns. It seemed to Marianne that she’d held her breath for the entire half hour. She didn’t really know much about Tim’s past, nor how the arrest in Albuquerque might have affected his legal status. Of course, the charges had been dropped….

“Surprised that I’m clean, aren’t you?” Tim said, when they finally drove away from Customs. “You never asked, but you thought I was a dangerous criminal with a long rap sheet.”

“I don’t know what you are,” Marianne said tartly.

“Sure you do.” He reached out and gave her shoulder a caressing squeeze.

How did this happen? Every day that she and Tim had been lovers, the situation had struck her as preposterous. He was seventeen years her junior; his most intellectual activity was computer games; she didn’t love him. Nor did he love her. But nearly every night they reached for each other, her hunger fueled by long abstinence and his by, she suspected, sheer animal hypermasculinity. They gave each other considerable sensual pleasure. She had stopped worrying what he thought of her aging body. This, she knew, was helped by the surreptitious survey all women make of each other; she looked younger than her age.

And they were considerate of each other, which also helped. They stayed away from subjects that might hurt: her children, his past, Sissy, Harrison. Albuquerque. Conversation was light, and if it didn’t satisfy Marianne, she never said so. Nor did he. They were careful, and tender. None of which made the situation any less preposterous.

Her cell rang. Stubbins, agitated enough to forget to shed his down-home persona, said, “What the hell do y’all think you’re doing? You back in the States?”

“My son is in trouble, Jonah. I’m going to him.”

“What kind of trouble? You got Saunders with you?”

“Yes. Ryan—”

“If it ain’t one thing with you, it’s some other fucking thing! You need another lawyer?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know yet. I’ll call you later.” She hung up and put the phone on silent. To Tim she said, “How did he know?”

Tim threw her an amused glance. “Your cell. Plus a tracker on my car and probably bugs in the house. You think Stubbins doesn’t know where you are every minute? He doesn’t want any more scandal anywhere near his spaceship.”

“Then he shouldn’t have hired me in the first place!”

“A complicated man, you told me once. This our exit?”

The house sat at the end of a country road, not far from the Reardon Wetlands Preserve. It seemed that even jobless, Ryan could not let go of his obsession with purple loosestrife. Or with aliens.

Ryan, did you— But she would never ask that.

She had a sudden piercing image of him as a small boy, her quiet and secretive middle child, looking from Elizabeth to Noah as the two shouted at each other about something or other. His fair hair, now darkened to shit brown, was always falling into his eyes. But when Ryan thought he was right, the gravitational pull of a black hole couldn’t move him.

Jason ran onto the porch, Colin behind him. “Grandma!”

Marianne almost stumbled on the broken steps. On the grimy porch she knelt and gathered both of them into her arms. They were dirty and smelled bad, but underneath it was that sweet little-boy scent. And it would only last a few more years, before each became another Ryan, or Noah, or Elizabeth, all of which in various ways had broken her heart.

No more of that maudlin stuff. She had a mission here, and she was going to accomplish it. “This is my friend Tim,” she told the boys. “Is Daddy inside?”

“He’s sick,” Jason said.

“He won’t get out of his red chair,” Colin said.

Tim said easily, “Let’s let Grandma see to your daddy, and you two show me around. Did that big tree over there get hit by lightning?”

“Yeah!” Jason said enthusiastically. “It’s all burned.”

“Poor tree,” Colin said.

“Show me,” Tim said. “Careful of those steps. They sure need fixing.”

Marianne threw him a grateful look and went into the house.

It was worse than she expected. Clinical depression, if deep enough, produced hopelessness and inertia, but this was something more. Ryan sat slumped in the grimy red wing chair, head down, shoulders sagging. He looked up when she spoke his name but didn’t change expression. The first words that leaped into Marianne’s mind were old-fashioned and scientifically imprecise: nervous breakdown. But that’s what this was. Caused by grief, by guilt, by a sense of failure, by some unknowable quirk of his biology? If Jason hadn’t called her, would the next step be suicide? She was looking, she knew, at pure pain, the kind that gnawed at you from inside until there was nothing left.

She fought to hold herself steady to her son’s need. “Ryan, it’s Mom.”

He nodded but didn’t speak.

“I came to help you. You need help, sweetie.”

She held her breath until he nodded again, slowly. He wasn’t too deep into his private hell to recognize that he could not get out alone.

“It’s going to be all right,” she said. “I promise you, Ryan. It’s all going to be all right.”

Grandma-for-real was different from Grandma-on-Skype. Colin didn’t remember her for real before this visit, but Jason did. Grandma-for-real got things going.

An ambulance came to take Daddy to a hospital, so doctors could make him well again. Grandma had to go with him to sign some papers—Colin didn’t understand that part, but it seemed important—and Tim wouldn’t let her go alone. That was weird; Grandma was a grown-up. Why did Tim get to tell her what to do? They had a whispered fight about it in the kitchen, and Tim must have won because he drove Grandma in his blue car. There was nobody to stay with Colin and Jason, so they had to go, too.

While they waited for the ambulance, Grandma made them both take showers. Tim got the upstairs toilet unstuck. At the hospital Tim took them to the cafeteria for hamburgers and French fries, which was good; Colin was really hungry. The hospital was too noisy, though, in ways Colin didn’t like. The swamp was better.

It was getting dark by the time they got home because they stopped at a supermarket and bought a lot of things. Even though she looked really tired, Grandma started cleaning. She made Colin and Jason help, too. Colin had to find his dirty clothes, which were almost all of them, and bring them to the laundry room to be washed after the bedsheets and pajamas got done. Jason had to do that, too, and then find the dirty dishes all over the house. Grandma told Tim, who was locking all the windows and doors, to clean the bathrooms. He said, “What?” but she gave him the same look that Colin’s preschool teacher gave boys who shoved or hit, and Tim started cleaning. Colin was impressed.

He and Jason were in their washed pajamas, having milk and cookies in the kitchen, when the other noise started. Colin jumped up so fast he knocked over his milk. “Grandma, the trees are afraid!”

“Colin,” Grandma said, “it’s okay. I know you’re scared about Daddy, but he’ll be all right.”

“Not me! Not Daddy! The trees are afraid! And the ground!”

Tim, mopping up the milk, smiled in a way that made Colin suddenly hate him. “An imaginative kid.”

Grandma said, “Colin, honey, I know you’re worried about your father, but the doctors at the hospital are—”

Colin stamped his foot and burst into tears. Nobody ever believed him!

Ten minutes later, the earthquake hit.

Marianne bent to pick the shards of a broken glass off the grimy kitchen floor. During the earthquake, dishes had rattled, toys fallen off shelves in the boys’ room, a small rickety table overturned. No windows broke. Outside, a few branches were down, but no trees. The glass had broken only because Marianne, startled, had dropped it. She crammed the pieces into the overflowing garbage pail.

While Tim checked the car and house, trailed by Jason, Marianne brought up data on her phone.

“I told you,” Colin said.

“That was indeed an earthquake, epicenter near Attica,” she told Tim when he returned to the kitchen, “although this isn’t supposed to be an earthquake area. Still, there’s a usually inactive fault line, the Clarendon-Linden fault line, just east of Batavia and USGS says—”

Colin’s words suddenly registered. Marianne said to him, “What did you say?”

“I told you!”

The little boy stood with legs apart, clad in pajamas printed with railroad cars, feet planted firmly on the kitchen floor. His bottom lip stuck out. His eyes, Marianne’s own light gray, looked very clear, and he did not blink. The back of Marianne’s neck prickled.

“You told me what, honey?”

“That something bad was coming. The trees were afraid. The ground was mad.”

She said carefully, “How did you know that, Colin?”

“I heard them.” His bottom lip receded a little; someone was actually listening to him.

“Heard them talk?”

“Trees can’t talk, Grandma.”

The voice of reason from a five-year-old. Marianne would have smiled, but her neck still prickled. “Then what did you hear?”

“First the ground… it sounded like… like a lot of cars. When they’re far away.”

“The ground rumbled?”

“Yes.” He nodded, clearly pleased with the word. “The ground all rumbled. Then the trees sort of… they… it sounds like the machine the Sheehans have for Captain. To make him stop barking. The Sheehans can’t hear it but dogs can. I can, too. Captain doesn’t like it.”

An ultrasonic emitter. And earthquake measurement depended on infrasonic. Was it possible that Colin could hear above and below the normal human range? Which, Marianne remembered dazedly, was 20 to 20,000 Hertz. How far below that was the infrasonic rumble from plate tectonics? But the trees… Trees didn’t emit sound, did they?

Colin’s little body had relaxed. He felt heard. He said confidently, “I heard the baby mouses, too. Way down in their hole. They wanted their mommy. Uh-oh—here it comes again!”

An aftershock, the slightest quiver under the floor, barely perceptible. Nothing else changed.

Unless everything had.

Her first concern was, had to be, for the boys’ uneasiness over their father. Only they didn’t show any. “He’s in the hospital,” Jason said reasonably, “and he doesn’t have cancer like Mommy did. So he’ll be okay.”

Colin nodded. He trusted in his big brother, and Jason trusted in the universe. Or maybe they were just being practical, as children could be: Life with Grandma ran more smoothly than life with Daddy. Or maybe their fear and anger were just deeply buried, as Ryan’s apparently had been, and would erupt later when Ryan came home again. Although that might be months away. His diagnosis was “clinical depression with suicidal ideation.”

Marianne pushed away her own fear and anger to focus on the next concern: Where were they going to live? The boys had no passports, so Canada was out. She made another call to Stubbins, who was too busy to take it. Was he losing interest in her efforts? Another worry. Without him, she had no source of income, no way to pay Tim, nothing. Although under their intimate circumstances, paying Tim would be—

Another thing to not think about.

However, one of Stubbins’s ubiquitous lieutenants relocated Marianne yet again. After evaluation, Ryan was transferred to Oakwood Gardens, a posh psychiatric hospital that Marianne at no time in her life could have afforded, discreetly located near a pleasant commuter town on the Hudson River. Tim, Marianne, and the boys drove to an anonymously furnished three-bedroom apartment, which she also could never have afforded, on the East Side of Manhattan. The boys were enrolled in a private school that usually had a waiting list longer than unspooled DNA.

Tim said, “Wow. Cute place. Small but sort of… you know, elegant. And Stubbins is paying for this and for Ryan’s hospital, too? What is it you do for him, again?”

Not nearly enough to justify all this.

But there was no use questioning Jonah Stubbins; the sphinx was less secretive. Marianne began to unpack the boys’ clothing.

Marianne and Colin took a taxi to the office building on West Fifty-Ninth, a little south of the zone patrolled by private guards hired by the West Side Protective Association. But Colin’s appointment was at noon, not a popular hour for violent crime, and Tim was with them, alert as always. The building guard wanded them and had a tense exchange with Tim about his Beretta, then sent a keypad signal to Dr. Hudspeth. They waited.

The lobby held sagging chairs and a vending machine. Two large ficus plants shed yellow leaves onto the dingy tile floor. Colin said to the guard, “Those trees are thirsty.”

“Yeah?” He wasn’t interested.

“You should give them some water.”

“The plant service went out of business.”

“You should give them some water now. They’re crying!”

The guard looked at him oddly. A voice said from the computer, “Thompson, please send them up.” The elevator door opened.

In the elevator Colin said to Tim, “I don’t like that man.”

“Yeah, he’s a prick.”

Marianne frowned at Tim, who grinned back.

It was Dr. Hudspeth that Marianne didn’t like. Marianne had chosen her because of her location, right across the park, and anyway how hard could it be to test a child’s hearing? But Dr. Hudspeth seemed to not test many children. There were no toys in the tiny waiting room. The doctor, who smiled constantly over what seemed like too many teeth, had the excessively bright, cloying manner of adults not used to children and possibly not very fond of them.

In the examining room she said, “Now, pumpkin, just sit there—good! Great! We’re going to play a little game. You like games, don’t you?”

Colin gazed at her from steady gray eyes and said nothing.

“Good! Great! Here’s the game: You’re going to wear these earphones. I’m going to press a button on this thing here. Sometimes it will make a noise and sometimes it will not. When you hear it make a noise in your earphones, raise your finger like this. Can you do that for me, pumpkin?”

Colin nodded, impassive.

“All right, here we go!”

Marianne heard nothing. Colin raised fingers, didn’t raise fingers, never changed expression. The test went on for about fifteen minutes. Dr. Hudspeth removed Colin’s earphones.

“You did great! Now, you go out to the waiting room with your daddy for a few minutes while I talk to Grammy.”

Colin said, “He’s not my daddy. My daddy’s sick and in the hospital until he gets better.”

“Good! Great! You go out and sit with… your friend.”

“He’s Grandma’s—”

“Colin, stay here,” Marianne said hastily. Grandma’s what?

Dr. Hudspeth said, “Well, all right, since there’s no problem here. Colin’s hearing is normal, in fact, quite acute. He heard right up to the limits of human hearing, at both high and low frequencies.” She beamed at Marianne and glanced at her watch.

Marianne said, “What was the lowest frequency you tested? Twelve Hertz?”

The doctor looked surprised, and not entirely pleased. “Are you an engineer, Mrs…. ah…” She glanced at her tablet. “Carpenter?”

“No. Was it twelve Hertz?”

“Yes. That’s the lowest frequency even children, whose hearing is more acute than ours, can hear, and then only under ideal laboratory conditions.”

“Test him lower, please.”

Dr. Hudspeth stared.

“Does the machine go lower than twelve Hertz?”

“Yes, but—”

“Do it.”

Marianne, former teacher and lecturer, knew how to sound authoritative. Dr. Hudspeth put the earphones back on Colin.

He raised and did not raise fingers.

“Mrs. Carpenter, I don’t think he understands. He’s raising fingers at eight Hertz, when he might be feeling physical vibrations in the body but can’t possibly—”

“Go lower.”

“This audiometer doesn’t go any lower!”

“Then we’re done here. Thank you, Dr. Hudspeth. I’d like a printout of the results, please.”

As they left the office, Dr. Hudspeth peered at the settings on her machine. Colin said, “That lady is upset.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I won’t. And I’m not a pumpkin.”

“No,” Marianne said. “You’re not.”

In the lobby, Colin insisted that Marianne buy a bottle of water from the vending machine. Carefully he dumped it over the ficus plants.

Marianne sat with Colin in the tiny bedroom he shared with Jason, who had protested at having to go to school when Colin got to stay home. In the kitchen Tim rattled pans, singing off-key as he made dinner. He was a surprisingly good cook, although Marianne was getting past being surprised by hidden talents in anybody. She sat cross-legged on Colin’s low bed, since his small sprawled body covered the rest of the floor. He was drawing elephants on a sheet of white paper.

Marianne had the opening she wanted. “Did you know that elephants can talk to each other across long distances by making noises that people can’t hear?”

Colin looked up. “My favorite book is Brandon and the Elephant in the Basement! I brought it in my suitcase. Do real elephants talk about how Brandon rescued the elephant from the basement?”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t speak elephant.”

Colin laughed and went back to his careful drawing of floppy gray ears. Marianne said, “People can’t hear elephants because their noises are too low—too deep—for people’s ears.”

Colin said nothing.

“But I’ll bet you could hear an elephant, couldn’t you?”

He said, not raising his head but with a certain stiffness in his thin shoulders, “I’m not ’spozed to talk about that, Grandma.”

“Says who?”

“Jason. He says everybody at school will think I’m weird.”

So Jason knew about this, whatever it was, and tried to shield his little brother. “Yes. But I’m not at your school. You can talk about it with me.”

She had Colin’s attention. He stood up, worn gray crayon in hand, and looked searchingly at her face. “Is that true?”

It was his father’s phrase: Ryan the scientist, always weighing evidence to find the singular truth he so fervently believed existed. Ryan had never accepted that truth could be many sided. Marianne kept her voice steady. “Yes, it is. You can tell me what you hear.”

Relief brightened Colin’s eyes. “I hear everything, Grandma.”

“What everything?”

He held up his fingers, smeared with gray and green crayon, to count off. “I hear people talk. Well—duh! I hear plants. They don’t talk words, but they make noises. Some are low like that ear doctor’s machine near the end, some are like Captain’s dog whistle, some are like people talking, only they go through the ground. I hear the ground when it’s mad. Low rumbles, like before the earthquake. I hear baby mouses in the ground, sometimes, when they want their mother. Those are like dog whistles, too. If you take me to a zoo, maybe I can hear an elephant!”

Infrasonics and ultrasonics both, Marianne thought dazedly. How was that possible? Was that possible? How much was the imagination of a five-year-old who believed an elephant could be rescued from a basement? She would have to do some research, including on biosonics. But before that—

“Colin, if you hear all that, all the time—Do you hear it all the time?”

“Yes.”

“Then how do you keep it all sorted out in your mind? Doesn’t it… confuse you? All those noises at once like that?”

“Sometimes. But now they’re in rows.”

“Rows? What do you mean?”

The child stooped and brought up his box of crayons. On the bedspread beside Marianne he laid out a row of six crayons. In front of them he arranged five more, then two, then one in front of that, to which he pointed. “See, Grandma, that’s you talking now. These two are Tim singing and the radio in the apartment out the window. This row is other stuff I hear but it’s not in the front. Then this far stuff, back here.”

Selective filters for background noise. She said, “Could you always do this, Colin?”

“I don’t know.”

Probably not. Marianne remembered Connie’s desperate frustration during Colin’s first three years of life. “He just cries and cries!” Connie had said, crying herself. Had the baby been unable to filter out the constant, multisonic noise that swamped him? But somewhere he had learned to do so. Noah, when he started school and well into the second grade, had been dyslexic, unable to see the difference between “was” and “saw.” The problem had disappeared halfway through Noah’s testing. “Sometimes,” the tester had said, “bright children just learn to compensate.”

Colin said, “Will you take me to the zoo to hear an elephant?”

The Bronx Zoo no longer had elephants, nor much of anything else. Funding cuts. But there must be an elephant somewhere.

“We’ll see. But Colin, I’d like to have you do another ear test. It will—”

“No,” Colin said instantly. He stuck out his bottom lip. “It’s stupid.”

“But it—”

“I’m sorry, Grandma,” he said, abruptly sounding very adult, “but no. I hated that doctor. And it’s stupid.”

“This won’t be a doctor. It’s a man who builds bridges, and he has special machines to hear bridges. You can touch the machines.”

“Really? Well… what about the elephant?”

They had reached a delicate stage in the negotiations. “Yes, but there aren’t any elephants in New York. If we go see the bridge man, then I promise you an elephant someplace, but it might take a while.”

Colin considered. “Okay.”

“You said that sometime you hear mice in the ground. When was that?”

“Only one time. In the old house. Not in the house, outside near the swamp. Daddy didn’t believe me. But I did hear them! I did!”

Internet reports of surviving mice sometimes included pictures. But the pictures could be pre–spore cloud and the sightings were as yet unsubstantiated by any scientifically reputable source. Still…

“Come eat before I throw it out!” Tim called.

“Careful, Grandma! Don’t step on my picture!”

“Never, sweetie,” Marianne said. She moved carefully around Colin’s drawing of an elephant with huge, floppy ears.

CHAPTER 18

S plus 6 years

On Saturday Grandma took Colin and Jason to the bridge man. That was where the wonderful thing happened, although not because of the bridge or the man.

They went in Tim’s blue car and they drove a long way out of New York, to a big field surrounded by a high fence with sharp wire on the top. The field had things all over it: machines that weren’t working right now, long steel bars, heavy bags, pieces of wood. It had a big trailer and a lot of trash, but it was still a field and there were patches of grass and dirt and wildflowers. In the river stood a big cement rectangle with part of the bridge built on it. Grandma and the bridge man, whose name was Rudy, hugged and said all the things grown-ups say, “Good to see you again” and “How long has it been” and all that stuff. Colin and Jason didn’t really listen. Tim checked out everything, looking for bad guys because that was his job.

To Colin’s disappointment, they couldn’t go onto the bridge. “Not safe, son,” Rudy said. “Not at this stage of construction.”

Instead they went into the trailer, which was just as messy as the field. Computers, dirty coffee cups, paper, machines, pizza boxes. Colin thought that Grandma didn’t approve, but she didn’t say anything.

“I appreciate your doing this, Rudy.”

“I’m not even sure what ‘this’ is. You want me to test this kid like he’s a bridge?”

“Yes.”

Jason said, “Can we go outside and look at the bridge?”

“You can, with Tim. Colin stays here.”

“No fair!” Colin cried, while Jason smirked.

“You can go outside too as soon as we’re done,” Grandma said. “Oh, there you are, Tim. Will you give Jason a tour of the construction machinery?”

Colin said, “I want to go, too!”

“Soon,” Grandma said in her no-fooling-around voice. “Rudy, you have both a laser vibrometer and an ultrasonic treatment evaluator? The new portable kinds?”

“Of course, but—”

“Can you use the vibrometer to find the lowest frequency he can hear and the evaluator for the highest?”

Rudy stared, shrugged, and laughed. “You always were weird, even when we were in high school and I had that terrible crush on you. Well, okay. Why not? You want some coffee first?”

“After. So we can talk.”

“Whatever you say, Marzidoats.”

Grandma smiled a tiny bit. “No one has called me that for forty years.”

“Time someone did. Okay, son, sit there. I’m going to point this thing out the window, at the bridge, and you raise your hand if you hear any noise. Like at the doctor, okay?”

“Yes,” Colin said. At least this time there weren’t earphones, and nobody was calling him “pumpkin.”

A computer screen lit up, and a low rumble sounded. Colin raised his hand.

Again.

Again.

Rudy stared at the computer screen, at Colin, at Grandma. He shook his head and started to say something but Grandma said, “Wait, please,” in her same no-fooling-around voice and Rudy closed his mouth.

First a lot of low sounds with one machine, then a lot of high sounds with a different machine. They were both pointed at the bridge, and Colin wondered if it could hear the noises. No—bridges weren’t alive. But the bridge was making noises—they were clear to him, different from the noises the machines made, and not very interesting. Colin got bored.

When they finally, finally finished, Rudy had a funny look on his face. Grandma said, “I’ll have that coffee now. Here come Tim and Jason. Colin, you can go outside with Jason, but you both stay where I can see you through this window here, which means you can see me.”

“Yes, Grandma.”

Tim said, “Hi, kid, tour in a minute,” and went inside the trailer.

Jason said, “What did they do to you?”

“I heard the bridge make noise.”

Jason nodded. He didn’t think Colin was weird. “Cool. Hey, let’s go climb on those big bags!”

“Grandma says we got to stay by the window.”

“Oh. Well, then—I got an idea—let’s pick some of those flowers for Grandma!”

“Okay.” The flowers were blue, just like Tim’s car, with petals sort of like squares. Rudy probably wouldn’t mind if they picked some because they looked like weeds. Colin grabbed the stem of one and pulled.

It was really tough! No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t break the stem. He tried another one, but that wouldn’t break. Jason couldn’t do it either.

“Stupid flowers!” Jason said. “We need a scissors.”

“We don’t got scissors.”

“No, but… look!” Somebody had broken a beer bottle a little ways away. It was out of sight of Grandma’s window, but Jason darted over, picked up a shard of glass, and ran back before she could notice. He lay on the ground beside the plant, sawing with the glass shard. The stem parted. Colin lay down next to him, to watch—he was a little doubtful about Grandma and the sharp beer bottle—with his ear pressed hard against the dusty ground, and that’s when the awesome thing happened.

“Jason!”

“What?” Jason had cut three blue flowers and was getting to his feet. “You got dirt on your face.”

“Everything is talking down there!”

“Talking? With words?”

“No, not words. But everything is making noises under the ground! Not the ground noises—the grass and flowers and the trees outside the fence!”

“Really? What kind of noises?”

Colin raised his head. The noises stopped. “Some are ultra and some are infra”—new words just learned from Rudy—“and some sound like the ones plants make when they’re thirsty, only coming in… in… like those guns in your video game. Ack-ack-ack.”

“Bursts,” Jason suggested.

“Yeah. Like that.”

“Are they shooting at each other?”

“No. It’s like… they’re sending secret messages.”

“Cool! You mean like the Internet! Do it again!”

Colin pressed his ear back onto the dirt. The noises started again. They were going through the dirt and Jason was right, it was like the Internet down there! All those noise e-mails going from one plant to another.

But what were they saying?

Colin arranged the sounds in rows in his head, with the ultra ones sort of like plants needing water except higher, right there in the front row. They came in bursts. Carefully he listened to the high bursts of sound until he was sure he could recognize them. He said, “Cut another flower.”

Jason did. The bursts of sound in the front row got faster and louder.

“Stop cutting!”

Jason did. The frantic bursts of sound stopped.

“Jase, the flowers are upset because you’re cutting them. I think they’re trying to tell the flowers over there!”

Jason frowned. You mean… like when that frog in Daddy’s swamp croaked real loud to warn the other frogs that we were coming?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“But,” Jason argued, “flowers can’t jump into water and swim away. No, wait, Daddy said something once… wait, I got it! He said that some plants gave out clouds of bad-smelling chemicals to scare away animals that might eat them. Maybe the flowers really are telling some other plants that I’m coming!”

Grandma and Tim came out of the trailer. Jason quickly dropped the broken beer bottle on the ground behind him. Grandma said, “There you two are! What have you got?”

“Flowers,” Jason said, holding them out. “For you.”

“Chicory,” Grandma said. “In really hard times in history, people would powder these to make coffee substitute. Thank you, boys!”

Colin looked doubtfully at the blue flowers; they didn’t look anything like Maxwell House. “Grandma,” he said, “can plants hurt?”

“Feel pain, you mean? No, honey, they don’t have nerve endings.”

That was a relief. It had troubled him.

She said, “Why do you ask?”

Colin looked up at her, knowing that he was so different from her, knowing too she liked him to tell the truth. Daddy also insisted on truth, or at least he did before he got sick. But maybe the truth didn’t have to include the beer bottle, if he said everything else. That was a fair trade.

“Grandma,” he said, “we—Jason and me—we got to tell you something.”

Far into the night, Marianne sat at her computer, reading journals to which she had never before paid much attention.

Plants did emit sounds that indicated thirst; the sounds came from the fracturing of overdry water-conducting tubules.

Corn roots clicked regularly, right at the lower edge of human hearing. No one knew why.

Researchers had known for two decades that plants emitted sounds as short-range deterrents or attractors for insects.

Plants could “hear” sounds, too—some orchids released pollen only for the high-frequency buzz of a certain bee.

Plant-to-plant communication with sound had all kinds of evolutionary advantages over communicating chemically—sounds were faster, required less energy, could go farther. How far? Since grass roots were highly connected underground and much of the world’s biomass was connected through fungi, the limits were unknown.

Sound moved easily through soil.

Other organisms without brains displayed mechanosensing, largely through changes in ion fluxes. Which plants certainly had.

Plants were influenced by nearby flora: Chili plants, to name just one, were shown as far back as 2013 to grow better near basil plants, even when the plants were isolated from sending each other chemical, touch, or light-transmitted signals.

Many mammals used infrasonics to communicate over distance: elephants, whales, hippos, rhinos, giraffes. Humans shared many gene sets with other mammals.

For over a hundred years scientists pooh-poohed the idea that bats could navigate by sound.

She got up to pour herself another glass of chardonnay. It was three in the morning but she didn’t feel sleepy. Carrying her glass, she slipped into the boys’ bedroom and looked down at Colin, curled into a ball in his locomotive-printed pajamas, his hair spiky on the pillow. In the dim light from the living room, he looked like a baby animal, a hedgehog or kitten.

The spore plague had activated sets of human immune-system genes that had lain dormant for 140,000 years. What other “junk genes” had they awakened in developing fetuses?

“Marianne,” Tim whispered in the doorway, “come to bed.”

His bed, he meant, although they made sure to each be in their own rooms before Colin and Jason awakened. But for the first time, Marianne did not feel the surge of desire.

She left the kids’ bedroom and closed the door. “Not tonight, Tim, okay? I’m pretty tired.”

“Okay.” His face was unreadable, but she could see the hard-on through his briefs. “Sleep well.”

“You, too.”

But sleep wouldn’t come. It wasn’t Tim she thought of, but Harrison. At Columbia, that Time magazine article had said, working on brain anomalies in mice. For scientific problems, Harrison had the tenacity of a pit bull. It was one of the things she’d loved about him.

Sleep was a long time coming.

“Marianne, it’s Jonah Stubbins.”

Of course it was. Marianne sat up groggily in bed. Christ—9:00 a.m.! The boys would be late for school. She heaved herself off the bed and threw on her robe.

“Marianne, you there?”

“Yes, but I can’t talk right now. I—”

The boys were gone. A note from Tim lay on the table in his block printing: TOOK KIDS TO SCHOOL.

“Never mind, Jonah. What is it?”

“What it always is. I want you and your grandchildren to move to the ship-build site, for safety’s sake. And your bodyguard, too, of course.”

Something in the way Stubbins said “your bodyguard” irritated Marianne. Her personal life was private, and whatever Stubbins thought he knew—or maybe even did know—was none of his business. But she kept her temper. “I told you, I can’t do that. I need to be close enough to my son’s facility to visit him. And my grandsons are settled in school.”

“We can helio you to Ryan whenever you want, and get a first-class tutor for the kids. I just want you to be safe, Marianne.”

“And I appreciate it. But we’re fine here.”

“Okay. Whatever you say. I’m just offering.”

“Thanks. But while I have you on the line, I want to ask—”

“Call me later. Gotta go.” He cut the connection.

What had she been going to ask, anyway? Why are you bankrolling me and my family for a copywriting job that a thousand others could do at a fraction of the cost? Although maybe she wouldn’t have asked it anyway. Marianne could probably support herself and the boys, but she could never afford Ryan’s care. Much as she hated the fact, she needed Jonah Stubbins.

If she hurried, maybe she could be out of the apartment before Tim returned. And she would not bring her cell.

The taxi left her at the fortified gates of Columbia University, which she had no clearance to enter. “Look,” she told the conspicuously armed guard, “just call Dr. Harrison Rice and tell him I’m here. Dr. Marianne Jenner. He’ll clear me.”

The guard looked skeptical. “Dr. Rice doesn’t give interviews.”

“I’m not a journalist. Just call him! He will be unhappy when he finds out I was here and not admitted.”

“Why doesn’t he know you’re here? Why didn’t you tell him you’re coming so he could put you into the system?”

Because I didn’t want to give him the chance to refuse. “Just call him, please! Dr. Marianne Jenner!”

She waited. The September air held the smoky promise of autumn. “Okay,” the guard finally said. “You’re cleared. It’s building—”

“I know where it is.”

Familiar and yet strange—it had been two and a half years since she’d been here. The Columbia campus looked less shabby. Perhaps alumni donations had increased as the economy picked up. But it was a shock to find a soldier with an AK-47 in front of the building containing Harrison’s lab.

He met her in the lobby. “Marianne. Good to see you.”

“Hello, Harrison.”

Familiar and yet strange. They shook hands awkwardly as two sets of images played in Marianne’s mind: she and Harrison drinking wine in bed, her naked leg thrown over his, both of them sated after sex, talking and talking about research. And Harrison the night Sarah had killed herself and Tim brought him home drunk, barely conscious, sodden and mumbling and stained with vomit.

“You look good,” he said. Marianne doubted that was true of her—she’d dressed quickly and hardly combed her hair—but it was true of him. His hair, now completely gray, hadn’t thinned much more, and his intelligent face was craggy in that handsome way aging men had and women did not. In his eyes, however, she could still see pain over Sarah, just as hers must be shadowed by Ryan and Noah.

“Thank you. Harrison, can we go somewhere to talk?”

She felt rather than saw his quick startlement, and so she added, “It’s not personal. It’s connected with your research. Something I think you should hear.” So—now she knew. His interest in her had not renewed. Had she hoped it had? But, of course, she was with Tim.

She had his professional attention. “Come to my office.”

It was the same preternaturally neat, impersonal environment she remembered so well. Harrison never kept around the framed plaques or silly mementos that other scientists did. Marianne had never even seen his Nobel medal.

In careful, precise sentences, she told him about Colin: the small earthquake on the Linden fault, Rudy’s testing of Colin in infrasonic and ultrasonic ranges, what the child had told her about managing the constant bombardment of sound by “putting them in rows in my mind.” As she talked, she watched his face—such a well-known face, such a stranger. She saw that he had already known about the hyper-hearing, which meant there must be other children like Colin. But his attention sharpened and he leaned forward in his chair at the “putting in rows.” He had not known that.

“He taught himself to do that?”

“Yes, although I don’t think it was as much self-teaching as unconscious compensation. How many more kids have you found with hyper-hearing?”

“It seems to be about five percent of the population, but it’s difficult to tell because so many parents use this damn Calminex to quell sensory overload. Compensators like Colin are a small percentage of that, but Colin is the first I’ve heard describe the mechanism, even metaphorically.”

“What progress have you made in identifying the genes and proteins involved?”

“We have the genes. Not yet how the proteins fold.”

She was intensely interested in this, plus the steps his team and other teams around the world were taking to discover more. It felt so good to be talking about science again, to be straining to follow a mind better than hers.

They talked for a long time. Harrison finished with, “Marianne, more good news—the mice are returning.”

“How? Where? What evidence? Or are you seeding immune specimens?”

He smiled at her eagerness, raised his hands palms up, let them drop in a gesture of humorous resignation. “Not our specimens, nor anybody else’s as far as we can tell. Which means that all our breeding programs were pointless. The returning mice developed immunity to R. sporii all on their own, or maybe a small number always had it and now they’re multiplying like—well, like mice. Mus musculus and P. maniculatus have each been captured in three states. Apparently nature will find a way.”

She heard an echo of Tim talking about grief softening over time: “It’s just life going on, you know?”

“I know,” she said.

“It’s all interconnected,” Harrison said, as if this were a new thought. Maybe, to a mind that focused with laser intensity on one scientific problem at a time, it was new. “The spores, the mice, the ecology, the children, and the solutions to all four.”

“I know,” she said again. “Stay in touch, Harrison. I’d like to know how your research is going.”

“Okay. Nice to see you again, Marianne.” He turned away.

Outside her building on the East Side, Marianne took out her key to open the vestibule door. A man came up behind her, spun her around, and shoved a gun into her chest.

“Don’t scream,” he said quietly, “or I’ll shoot.”

She glanced wildly around. No one on the street, although it was midmorning on a Tuesday. A wave of nausea swept up her throat; she fought it down and tried to think.

“Here, take my purse. I won’t say anything to anyone.”

He didn’t deign to answer this stupidity. Marianne studied him, memorizing what she could. He wore a ski mask—in September!—but she could see his eyes: deep brown. Pale thin lips, the bottom of a light-brown mustache. About two inches taller than she was, broad shoulders, thick neck, jeans and black leather boots and a light green nylon jacket zipped to the neck, clear latex gloves.

“I don’t want your purse,” he said. “I want you out of New York. Be gone by the end of the week, Marianne Elaine Jenner. You alien-loving motherfuckers have ruined this country and we don’t want you polluting this city.” He dropped something at her feet and ran.

Marianne fumbled with her key, dropped it, picked it up, shook as she put it in the lock. Only when she was inside did she realize she’d also picked up his dropped article. What if it was a bomb? No, it was just a thin piece of cloth, a patch of some sort. What if it was imbued with anthrax, or tularemia, or a genetically altered microorganism? But she’d already touched it, so she kept it in her fingertips as she ran up two flights of stairs, avoiding the elevator from some crazy fear that either it would harm her or the patch would harm it, to her apartment. She rang the bell with her other hand.

Tim flung open the door. “Marianne! What the fuck did you—What is it? What happened?”

She told him, her voice unsteady but her movements sure as she bagged the patch in a ziplock freezer bag and then washed her hands with a surgeon’s thoroughness.

Tim said, “Let me see that thing.”

She held it out to him. For the first time, she saw what it was: a crudely embroidered patch of a mouse face with huge bloody fangs and the letters EFHO.

“I know these clowns, Marianne. Earth for Humans Only. Strictly small-time bullies. If they have any fancy bioweapon things on this patch, then I’m the president of the United States.”

A relief. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. But what the hell were you doing outside without me? Or without your cell?”

“I forgot the cell. I needed to check something at the Museum of Natural History. Something not online.”

“I thought the museum was closed.”

“Not all of it. The research library is open.” This was true.

“You took a cab?”

“Yes.”

“And you couldn’t wait for me.” His blue eyes burned at her.

“I thought it was safe enough, midmorning and not that far away.”

“Uh-huh. But when he attacked you, there were no people close by.”

“No, Tim—I told you that. But it wasn’t an attack. He didn’t hurt me.”

“Just threatened your life. And he knew not only where you live but also your full name, even your middle name. Which wasn’t in the magazine article. How would he know it?”

“I don’t know—maybe he found it on the Internet.”

“But why use the whole name?”

“I don’t know! Tim, you’re missing the main point here!”

“I’m not missing anything.” Still his eyes trained on her face, as disconcerting as gun sights. “It’s just weird, is all.”

“Do you think I should call the police?” She’d hoped to fly under all official radar in New York, stealth-protected by Stubbins’s fake IDs and military-grade encryption programs for her computer and cell.

“No, no cops. They won’t do anything and they’ll blow your cover even more. Like I said, these are small-time bullies. What kind of gun?”

She had no idea. It might have been a realistic toy, for all she knew. She shook her head.

“From now on, you don’t go out without me. For now, come here.”

He put his arms around her. But she felt neither comfort nor desire, and that only made everything worse.

CHAPTER 19

S plus 6.2 years

Colin dreamed again about the square blue flowers. Jason was cutting them with the broken beer bottle and they were screaming at them from little mouths on the petals. Horrible! And then it was even worse because Daddy was lying deep underground where the plant Internet was and he was making noises, too. “What? What?” Colin and Jason said, because they couldn’t understand what Daddy was trying to say, but he just went on making those terrible noises and Colin woke up scared in the dark.

“Jason?”

But Jason wasn’t in his bed.

All at once the familiar morning sounds rushed into Colin’s mind: Jason and Grandma and Tim were in the kitchen, making breakfast. Grandma’s houseplants clicked in the living room; they needed watering. The building rumbled in its friendly morning way. From two stories up it was harder to hear the ground under the building, but it sounded normal, too. The screaming flowers were just a dream. Jason said dreams couldn’t hurt you.

But other things could.

When Tim left Colin and Jason at their school, Jason ran ahead to his second-grade room, where the teachers put him because he was so smart, shouting to some kids he knew. Colin was in the first grade because he was smart, too, and anyways all the kids in kindergarten either couldn’t hear anything or else took some drug that made them move really s-l-o-w. Colin hung back as long as he could but he had to go to his room, too, and then Paul would be waiting.

Colin knew that Mommy was dead and Daddy was in the hospital, but sometimes he pretended that Uncle Noah with his aliens had sneaked into the house and flown off with Mommy and Daddy. He knew that wasn’t really true, but it might have been because Uncle Noah was Daddy’s brother, and if Jason was dead or in the hospital, Colin would rescue him. But somehow Jason never seemed to see when Colin needed rescuing.

Paul Tyson was in third grade. His parents, he bragged on the playground, were very important. They had lots and lots of money. Paul always had the best tablet that played the best games, even if the teachers locked up all electronics in the safe except at lunchtime. Paul’s tablet even had Ataka!, the really cool Russian videogame that everybody liked. It meant “Attack!”—they talked different in Russia. But Paul hated Uncle Noah’s aliens; he said bad words about them all the time. And he was a bully, a word Colin hadn’t even known until he started going to the Healy School.

Now Paul and two of his friends stood in the middle of the school lobby. Colin managed to get past them by walking close to a group of fifth-graders, the oldest kids in the school. They ignored him, but Colin knew from experience that at least one of them, a fierce girl with dreadlocks and shiny clothes, wouldn’t let anyone bully anyone else. It was her crusade. That was a word Grandma used a lot; she had a crusade, too.

Even so, Paul deliberately stepped hard on Colin’s foot. “Oops, so sorry,” he said, and the fierce girl glared at him. Paul scurried away. From the doorway of his classroom he smiled at Colin. Colin’s knees wobbled. How could a smile be so nasty?

First grade was easy, compared to all the stuff Grandma taught him and Jason. Sometimes Colin was bored. But today they were doing something exciting: drawing a zoo. Colin drew an elephant. He almost drew it in a basement, like in his favorite book, but probably zoos didn’t have basements.

Then, just as he was finishing the elephant’s ears, he had to go to the bathroom—really bad, and right now. Ms. Kellerman gave permission and Colin raced down the hall and into the boys’ bathroom. In the stall, he heard the bathroom door open, and when he came out, Paul was blocking the exit. “Hey, Colin Jenner.”

Colin froze. He made himself say, “My name is Colin Carpenter.”

“No, it’s not. And you didn’t find the tracker I put on you, did you? Feel around the back of your pants.”

By itself, like it wasn’t even part of him, Colin’s hand circled behind his body. The tracker was the size of a dime, stuck on the back of his jeans. He pulled it off and held it out to Paul. He didn’t know what else to do. Paul was so big—

The older boy hit him hard and fast, right in the stomach. Colin fell to the floor. Paul raised a foot and kicked Colin in the stomach with his boot.

“Your grandma is an alien-lover. You thought nobody knows about her and your family, right? Think again, fucker. Your grandma fucks Denebs and maybe you would, too, if the cowards ever came back here. Only they better not because my mom and dad would kill them all dead. You listening to me, you piece of shit? You—”

“What is going on here!”

Black boots, blue pant legs… security. Maybe the bathroom had a camera? Somehow Colin staggered to his feet while Paul said meekly, “Nothing, sir.”

“Nothing? You hit him!”

“I—” Paul didn’t seem to have any words. Paul! A third-grader!

Colin gasped, “He… did hit me. But it… it was my fault. I called him a name.” It took everything in him to keep his voice quiet, to act like his stomach didn’t burn and scream, to add in his grandmother’s tone, “It’s over now.” But he was not going to explain what Paul had said. Grandma and Tim had told Colin that nobody at the school must know Colin’s real last name or about Grandma’s crusade. They told Colin that over and over—but Paul knew! Colin was desperate that at least the security guard didn’t know, too.

The guard studied both boys. Finally he said, “See that it is over. Now go back to your classrooms.”

They did, but halfway down the hallway Paul turned to shout at the guard, “Cameras in the bathrooms are illegal! I’m telling my father about this!”

Colin slipped quietly into his classroom. His chest didn’t hurt much, but his stomach did. The drawing of the zoo was finished and people were cleaning up. Colin picked up his crayons, clutching them so hard that one snapped in two, sounding just like the pop! that plants made when they really, really needed watering.

Even if Marianne had continued with the Star Brotherhood Foundation, its major mission became pointless. The United States government formally discontinued work on the spaceship it had been building from the Deneb engineering plans. The ship, badly damaged by the superstorm three years ago, had been the center of political problems since its beginning. Now it became a casualty of budget shortfalls, congressional delay, party politics, and virulent opposition from the voting blocs that believed anything bequeathed by the aliens could only harm humanity. Some Americans still believed that the Denebs had caused the spore cloud; a larger percentage believed that the aliens knew the cloud would wipe out mice and had not told Terrans this.

“It’s so shortsighted!” Marianne raged to Tim as they watched the late-night news. “Christ, the statistics are right there! In seventy-five years—less if we keep going on the way we are—CO₂ in the atmosphere will reach seven hundred parts per million. You’re looking at a devastating effect on the oceans, and possibly a near-total ecological collapse!”

“Uh,” Tim said. He lounged on the sofa beside her, a beer in his hand. When she glanced at him, he added, “But we have more private spaceships building, right? Besides Stubbins.”

“Yes.” He should know that already. Didn’t he ever follow the news?

Six years ago, everything known about space travel had become outdated. All the programs in development or nearing completion were suddenly horse-drawn barouches in a world of Ferraris. Space agencies in the US, in Russia and China and India and the European Union—all had gone into shock. Some had folded, some had stubbornly continued with “human” rocket plans, and some had fast-tracked the building of ships according to the alien plans. The EU, China, and Russia were building “Deneb” spaceships.

In the United States, the Boeing ship, half built, was stalled by fiscal problems.

SpaceX had thrown all of its resources behind a ship being built in California, now two-thirds done. Blue Origin was farther behind.

Sierra Nevada chose to continue with its old technology, on the reasonable grounds that it was comprehensible.

The newest company, Stubbins’s Starship Venture, was reported to have the ship closest to completion. Although since the reports issued from Stubbins’s PR machine and the site was closed to everyone else, it wasn’t known how true this was. Fantastic salaries and freedom from government politics had lured some of the best talent in the world to the Venture building site in Pennsylvania. As CEO of his perfume company, Stubbins had had the reputation of trusting the project heads he hired to get their goals met, without looking too closely into their methods. Stubbins’s word was always the final arbiter, but he listened more closely to his scientists than to his accountants, and that alone was such a novelty that he attracted people who otherwise might have shunned his unsavory reputation. If you were American and wanted to go to the stars, Jonah Stubbins looked like your best bet.

Not everybody wanted to go to the stars. The anchorwoman’s next story covered an ugly, violent protest in Pittsburgh, the closest big city to the Venture site. Citizens to Save Earth, yet another anti-alien group, smashed windows and burned cars. A dozen people were injured.

During the last year, public attitudes toward Stubbins’s ship seemed to have settled into an unexpected—by her, anyway—bimodal distribution. Marianne had expected a division along religious lines, since seven years ago the spore cloud had been demonized by fundamentalists as the End Times, or God’s cleansing, or one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (usually but not always Pestilence). She also expected that those who had lost family to R. sporii would most oppose the expedition to World. Certainly her experiences giving lectures had created that impression.

But lecture-goers, it turned out, were not a typical sample. The bimodal distribution was neither religious nor familial. It was economic.

Those who had recovered from the economic collapse, or whose jobs had never been cut by it, mostly approved of Stubbins’s private foray to the stars. They liked it because it was adventuresome, or because it wasn’t costing taxpayers anything, or because it might produce new technology or additional markets for Terran products. The second group, those hardest hit by the collapse, opposed Stubbins and thought the government should stop him. These people hated the aliens and wanted no more contact with them.

There was a third group, small but very vocal online, who both hated Denebs and wanted Stubbins to travel to World. They wanted revenge, to hit World as hard as the spore plague had hit Earth. In this they were closer to opinion dominant in Central Asia than to most of the United States.

Tim drained his beer. Marianne twisted her lips in disgust at the TV screen. “Look at them. The destructive idiots. They have no facts, but that doesn’t stop them.”

“Uh,” Tim said.

She turned to him. “Aren’t you at least a little bit interested in all this?”

He sat up straighter on the sofa. “You know I am.”

“Then why don’t you act like it?”

“Not everyone feels your need to spread emotion all over every last goal, Marianne. Some people just act.”

“Are you implying that I’m not acting enough?”

His eyes glittered. He crushed his beer can with one hand and thumped the can onto the coffee table. “When I came aboard the foundation it was because of Sissy, but I believed in it, too. In building the government ship. But that’s over now, and you’ve gone from giving speeches to just writing Internet stuff praising Stubbins.”

“It’s a different means to the same end.”

“Is it? Maybe. But just because I want us to go to the stars doesn’t mean I want Stubbins to take us there.” He stood and got another beer from the kitchenette.

By the time he’d returned, Marianne’s face was expressionless. She said, “The group at Columbia has isolated the genes that have been spore-activated and may cause the changes to the auditory parts of the brain.”

“Hey, great!”

He didn’t ask anything about the genes, or what the discovery might mean. Marianne knew she was testing him, and disliked herself for doing it, and did it anyway. “Also, there are verified reports now of mice in the wild that are immune to R. sporii.”

“So things are looking up? That’s good.”

“Don’t you want details?”

He drained the second beer—third? Fourth? Tim’s capacity was astonishing. He said quietly, “Sure. Here’s a detail I want. Did you get all these research updates from Harrison Rice?”

“Yes.”

“By e-mail?”

“Some of them. Some in person.”

“You went to see Rice. You two still have a thing for each other?”

“No. Not at all.”

“But that’s where you went when you were attacked outside this building that other time?” Tim said. “You told me you’d been to a museum library.”

She said nothing, gazing at him steadily. If he got angry, this might be over. Her heart beat harder.

“You lied to me.”

“Yes. I should not have. But you keep me on such a tight leash, you hem in my movements every minute, you check up on me… I’m not a child, and I resent being monitored constantly.”

“It’s my job to keep you safe. I’m doing my fucking job.”

He was right. Before she could think what she wanted next, he said, “Ah, Marianne, let’s not claw at each other. We’re both just tired. Come to bed.”

His solution to everything. But she went, from remorse at having lied to him or from obligation or from sheer confusion in her own mind. Not from desire. For the first time, the sex between them didn’t work, and they ended up lying in the bed with a foot of sheet between them, neither saying anything, both alone with their thoughts.

The tree was really old.

Colin leaned against its trunk, listening, although what he really wanted to do was put his ear to the ground and listen to everything down there. But that would look weird to the other kids on the playground. It was a pretty small playground, because the Healy School was squished between big New York buildings. The playground had this tree by itself near the fence, a bunch of littler trees where the third-grade girls sat with their teacher, a basketball concrete where the third-grade boys were jumping and shouting, and some slides and stuff. The rest of the first-graders were on those. Only two classes got recess at a time because there just wasn’t room. People had to wait their turn.

Maybe if Colin snuck behind the tree and lay down, nobody would notice him. There were bushes near there, too. The ground was muddy and cold and he would get his clothes dirty, but he really really wanted to listen to the tree and bushes. He slipped behind the bushes and lowered himself to the ground. It hurt because ever since Paul kicked him yesterday, Colin’s belly had pain in it. Nonetheless, he pressed his ear hard against the muddy soil.

So much was going on down there! Clicks and rumbles and high-pitched sounds and low-pitched sounds. Some of them he’d heard before, but he didn’t know what any of them meant. They weren’t real sentences, of course, but they must mean something, like when thirsty plants made noises to want water. But these plants weren’t thirsty; it’d rained really hard last night. Also, the tree branches above him were making noises. So many interesting sounds…

And then another one. Colin, flat on his stomach, raised his head. That hurt his belly, too. He saw black boots.

“Hey, Jenner. No school guard here now.” Paul spoke very fast, like the words were bursting out of him. “That guard called my father, you know? You got me in trouble for sassing back and it’s your fault, you piece of shit.”

The tree branch above them made another sound.

Paul raised his boot to kick Colin.

Colin rolled to one side—it hurt his middle to do that!—and Paul followed him. Colin lay still and squeezed his eyes shut. Now now NOW…

The dead branch on the old tree cracked with a noise anyone could hear, and it hurled down on Paul. He screamed.

People rushed toward them, kids and teachers and a security guard. Then there were sirens and an ambulance and police—not a school guard but a real New York cop, with a gun—asking Colin questions. He kept his hands over his belly while he answered the questions. He said he and Paul were playing, and did not say that Paul had kicked him once before and was going to kick him again. What if they found out that he made Paul move to stand under the tree branch just before it was going to fall? They might put him in jail! Nobody must know what really happened, not any of it, not ever… Paul was not moving. “Concussion,” somebody said, and Paul was taken away in the ambulance.

Colin clutched at his teacher’s hand. She looked down at him, surprised and concerned, but he did it mostly because his legs felt so wobbly. Still, the pain in his middle was less now.

Don’t let Paul die, Colin thought. If that happened, Colin would be a murderer, just like on TV. Don’t let Paul die!

But…. don’t let him come back to school soon, either.

“Colin, what’s wrong?” Grandma said.

They were eating dinner, Grandma and Tim and Colin and Jason, and Jason was talking about some clay maps that his class was making in school. Or maybe not clay but something else. Colin couldn’t listen very well and he couldn’t eat either.

“Hey, buddy,” Tim said, “do you feel all right?”

“I’m… good.”

Jason said, “You don’t look good.”

“I’m…” Colin threw up all over his dinner plate. “It hurts!”

“What hurts?” Grandma said, jumping up. “Tim, he’s sweating like a pig!”

Did pigs sweat? Colin didn’t know. He started to cry, and everything got fuzzy except the picture in his head of a pig, sweating tears.

Icy needles pierced Marianne’s gut as the ER doctor ran her hands over Colin. “What is it?” Marianne said. No no no, I can’t lose Colin too—

“Spleen. It’s been bleeding for a while. Did he injure it in the last twenty-four hours?”

“No! Not that I know of!”

“Grandma! A boy—” Colin fainted.

The next half hour was a blur. Then, as if it had all happened in a moment, Marianne found herself standing outside an operating room while a different doctor, dressed in blue scrubs, spoke to her in rapid sentences.

“The spleen appears to have been damaged sometime in the last few days and was slowly bleeding into itself until it stabilized. Did he complain of pain yesterday or this morning?”

“No, but he was pale and sort of weak-seeming, and then he seemed to get better. Is—”

“It takes a fairly hard blow to cause spleen injury.”

He was looking at her with suspicion. All Marianne could do was shake her head.

“The initial blow caused the spleen to rupture. The peritoneal cavity is filling with blood. The operating team is going in to take out the spleen, and he is receiving a blood transfusion. He should survive this, and the effects on his life will be minimal, but you should know that we are obligated to report this to the child-protection people.”

It barely registered. “But he’ll be all right? He’ll be all right?”

“We’ll certainly do everything we can.” He disappeared into the operating room. Marianne staggered to a chair in a waiting area and dropped into it, her eyes fastened to the door through which the doctor had disappeared. Tim took her hand.

It was the worst hour of her life. Ryan was damaged, Noah was gone, Elizabeth was furious at her—but they were all still alive. Marianne sat unmoving, scarcely breathing, as if her own motionlessness could keep Colin from leaving her. Jason sat pressed so close to Tim that he seemed to want to blend into him. If either of them spoke to her, she didn’t hear. Her eyes remained trained, unblinking, on the door through which the surgeon would come.

He did, eventually. “Mrs. Carpenter? Colin will be fine.”

Marianne could move again.

“We removed the spleen. He can function normally without it, although he may be more than usually susceptible to certain types of infection for the rest of his life. He can go home in a day or two. You’ll get discharge directions.”

“Let me see him.”

“Not yet.” The doctor disappeared, without explanation. Marianne started angrily after him, but Tim grabbed her shoulder.

“He has to wake up, Marianne. And then they want a cop or social worker to talk to him first. Because of what that first doctor said.”

Child protective services. They thought Marianne, or Tim, had abused Colin. Marianne wanted to tear the hospital apart with her fists. To think that she could ever… And they would want to check records that didn’t exist for “Colin Carpenter.” This was going to be complicated.

She said wearily, “Take Jason home, Tim. I can deal with this.”

“All right,” Tim said, “if you promise not to leave the hospital until I get back.”

“Promise.” She wasn’t leaving the hospital until she could take Colin with her.

When they finally let her see Colin, hours later, he lay in a recovery room, tubes stuck into his little body, an oxygen line in his nose. The woman who’d been talking to him, either a cop or a social worker, nodded and left. Colin peered out from under his white hospital blanket and said, “Did Paul die?”

“What, honey?”

“Did Paul die?”

“Who’s Paul?”

“I told that lady. The nice one who gave me this.” He held up a small toy airplane.

“Paul will be fine. How do you feel, honey? Does anything hurt?”

“I had to tell the lady. That I could hear the tree was going to fall. The police said I had to tell everything. My real name, too. I’m sorry, Grandma.”

“It’s all right. As long as you’re okay, everything is all right.”

His eyes were closing. Marianne said, “I’ll be right back,” but he might have already been asleep.

The social worker, joined by a cop, waited for her in the corridor. They found an empty waiting room. Marianne explained about the aliases, and the social worker told her what Colin had said.

A third-grade bully, with metal-capped boots. Kicking Colin in the bathroom, threatening to do it again under the tree, until by sheer chance a dead branch cracked and fell on him. Paul Tyson had taunted Colin, using his real last name.

“You are cleared of suspicion, Dr. Jenner,” the social worker said. As if that was what mattered. “And we’ll follow through with Paul’s parents.” Then the woman, who went around dispensing toy airplanes in return for children’s truths, closed her tablet and left. The cop followed her, but only after a hard look that told Marianne exactly what were his sentiments about alien-loving Embassy scientists who wanted a spaceship built.

She checked on Colin once again. He was still asleep. Her cell would not work on the hospital ward. She took it outside, defying Tim’s orders, and called Jonah Stubbins.

Tim and Marianne stood in the apartment’s tiny kitchenette as he made coffee. It was after midnight, but Tim could drink coffee at any time of the day or night and still sleep. Marianne, nearly twenty years older, could not. Her body ached for sleep but she had to do this, now, tonight. Jason lay asleep in the boys’ room, curled up in Colin’s bed. She had found him holding Colin’s old stuffed elephant and she’d almost burst into tears. Stress.

Tim poured hot water on cheap instant-coffee crystals; he would drink anything with caffeine. “And so Colin thinks he made the tree branch fall on the little shit.”

“No. But he lured Paul to stand under it because he knew it would fall.”

“The social worker didn’t believe that.”

“No, but—”

“I’m not sure I believe it, either,” Tim said. “I’m more interested in how this Paul Tyson knew who Colin was. I want to talk to that kid.”

“It doesn’t matter how he knew,” Marianne said wearily. “It only matters that our identity is out yet again. I can’t keep moving like this. It’s not good for the boys.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be good to stay here now, either. You gotta see that, Marianne.”

“I do see it. Tim, I’m taking Stubbins’s offer to move us all to the Venture building site and get a tutor for the boys. They’ll be safe, and I can work just as well there.”

Tim paused, coffee cup halfway to his mouth. He put the cup, undrunk, on the tiny counter. “Yeah? I thought you wanted to be close enough to see Ryan.”

“I can’t do both. Jason and Colin must come first.”

“I get that.” He picked up the coffee and drained it in one gulp, hot though it must still be. Marianne waited, knowing what was coming.

He said, “And while the boys are being tutored and you’re working on your computer, what am I supposed to be doing? You won’t need a bodyguard there, or the kids to be taken to school, or anything like that.”

“I don’t know what you could do.” Actually, now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure what he did all day now. “I’m going out,” he would say, but where? And why hadn’t she thought to ask before now? Self-focused, that’s what she’d been.

“Tim—”

“You don’t want me to go with you, do you?”

She said gently, “I think we both know that this relationship isn’t really working. And that it never had a future.”

He didn’t answer, and despite her relief that he wasn’t going to make a scene, her pride was bruised. Dumb, dumb! She should be glad that Tim wasn’t hurt—as it was clear from his face that he was not—and that they didn’t love each other. He had never felt about her the way he’d felt about Sissy, and for her the attraction had mostly been sexual. That had drained away. Stress, or acceptance of how different they were, or maybe just the passing of time.

She suddenly felt very old.

Tim said, “I’ll miss those kids. Can I come see them sometimes? And what will you tell them?”

She hadn’t thought that far. “Yes, of course you can come see them. We’re leaving as soon as Colin can travel. Stubbins will send a car.”

He moved toward her, and she tensed. But his kiss lacked all passion. “Go to bed, Marianne. You’re exhausted.”

She did. When she woke, in midmorning, Jason had been taken to school. Tim’s things were still in his room. He wouldn’t leave until Colin was discharged and Marianne and the boys safely transferred to Stubbins’s protection. The innate decency of this moved Marianne. But she couldn’t afford any more emotion. Hastily she dressed to go to the hospital.

One more trip before they could leave for Pennsylvania. Marianne drove alone to see Ryan. It was a lovely day, amazingly warm for November, and Ryan sat outside in an Adirondack chair. He wore his own clothes, his hair neatly combed. He gave his mother a tired smile. “Hi, Mom.”

Encouraged, she said, “Hello, Ryan. How are you?”

“Fine.” But a minute later his face sagged again and tears filled his eyes. “I want to go home.”

Marianne took her son’s hand. He said that often, always when he seemed most stressed, the words seeming to rise unbidden to his lips. They were unbidden, she knew now: unwilled, pushed up from some place deeper than rationality. The words were not literal. There was no specific geographical place Ryan wished to return to. He wanted to go back to the past, to the “home” where he was the child that his depression had regressed him into being, the child who was happy and cared for, the child who’d assumed happiness and order were the way the universe worked. Who had not yet been broken by an entirely different universe.

She had always thought it was Noah who was the weakest child, the drifter who belonged nowhere. She had been wrong. Noah had gone, happily, to the stars. But there was no way for Ryan to go where he wanted. Connie was dead and his beloved job with the wildlife agency gone, and the past could not come back again.

“I want to go home,” he said again.

“I know, sweetheart,” she said. “I know.”

He said nothing for the rest of her visit. Marianne sat for an hour just holding her son’s hand in the soft autumn sunlight.

CHAPTER 20

S plus 6.2 years

Jonah Stubbins was building his starship, the Venture, in northwestern Pennsylvania. The site made sense.

Part of the Allegheny Plateau, the area was free of hurricanes and tornadoes. Its geography shielded it from superstorms. Earthquakes were rare and mild. Before global warming had reached its present state, deep snow and ice storms had been frequent here, but no more. Creeping desertification, not yet far advanced, nonetheless had proven drying enough to cause many farmers to sell their gentle hills. Once coal had been mined here, but never in the quantities found farther east, and most lodes were played out. Stubbins had gotten huge swaths of land reasonably cheap.

Glaciers had left the entire area dotted with caves. However, unlike the clear, large caves to the east and south—once tourist attractions, now mostly closed due to lack of state funds—the majority of caves in this part of Pennsylvania had been formed by stream water forced underground during wetter times. The caves were small, twisty, and filled with mud. Clearing them out would involve large and conspicuous equipment. Stubbins was not worried about stealth attacks from underground.

Marianne’s first sight of the vast compound was a strip of dirt, backed by an electrified fence topped with barbed wire reinforced by periodic guard towers. Beyond the fence lay another, wider strip of bare ground, followed by another fence, and then low cinder-block buildings. The whole thing looked like a gigantic maximum-security prison.

“Wow,” Jason said from the backseat. Colin said nothing. He had, since Tim’s departure, taken to sucking his thumb. Marianne, riding beside the driver of the car that Stubbins had sent for them, turned around to see how the boys were taking this.

“This is so cool!” Jason bounced in his seatbelt. “Look, Col, it’s great!”

Colin took his thumb out of his mouth.

Thank heavens for Jason’s upbeat nature.

They passed through the gate and drove for longer than she’d expected, past bulldozers and trucks, cinder-block outbuildings and groves of trees, trailers and barracks of raw weathered lumber. The closer they drove to the ship itself, the messier the site became. Thick cables, transformer stations, a thirty-five-ton crane. Equipment shrieked; people milled about, shouting to be heard. Marianne remembered the smooth, noiseless descent of the Embassy into New York Harbor and wondered if anything that clean and sleek could really emerge from this chaos.

The car stopped in front of a barracks, a long low building with no adornment, windows and doors set in straight lines regular as soldiers at drill. The doors opened directly onto the weedy dirt outside. Two women stood in front of the farthest door, one young and pretty, the other Marianne’s age but much shorter and wider. “Here we are,” the driver said.

The young woman held out her hand. “Dr. Jenner, I’m Allison Blake, the boys’ teacher. And you two must be Jason and Colin.”

“Hi,” Colin said, but Jason made a little noise of disgust.

“You can’t be both of our teacher ’cause I’m in second grade and Colin’s in first!”

“But I am,” Allison Blake said solemnly, “because I’m a super-teacher.” She reached up behind her neck and released a red cape, which billowed around her. Her expression remained completely serious. After a bewildered moment, Jason laughed.

Colin did not. “Then what’s your superpower?” he demanded.

“That’s for you to find out. But I know yours. You can hear the ground.”

Marianne blinked. What? How the hell did she know that Colin—

“You’re wondering how I know that,” the teacher said. “It’s because I have another student who can do it, too. Would you like to meet him sometime soon?”

“Yeah!” Colin’s eyes shone with wonder. Jason also looked interested. Marianne thought, not for the first time, that if Jason’s temperament had included any jealousy at all, life would be even more difficult than it was now. Ever since Paul Tyson’s assault, Colin had been moody and unpredictable.

Allison Blake said, “Then put your suitcases in your room here and ask your grandmother if you can come with me.”

“Yes, go on,” Marianne said. She was here for their safety, and she had to trust this place or she would go mad. “I’ll get the cases.”

Allison led the boys away. The short woman said to Marianne, “Quite a show. She’s great with kids. Has to be or Jonah wouldn’t have hired her. I’m Judy Taunton, deputy physicist in this medicine show. Jonah sent me to greet you.”

“Where is he? And how did he know—”

“About the kids? Jonah knows everything. And the value of nothing, as Oscar Wilde so presciently said. Excuse me, I know this is a filthy and archaic habit, but I’m in desperate need.” She lit a cigarette.

Marianne studied her. Judy Taunton was no more than five feet tall, solid as a cinder block, with gray hair in a buzz cut. Up close, her face looked younger than her body, and Marianne revised her estimate downward to midforties. She wore baggy jeans and a loose blue work shirt that made her look even wider than she was. The shirt was embroidered on the collar and placket with exquisite silk flowers, hand done. Judy exhaled a perfect smoke ring.

“Okay, let’s get you oriented. Jonah wanted to meet you himself but spaceships are demanding bitches, so you get me. This is your suite. Not exactly the Ritz but we’re practicing Taoist simplicity here, or possibly scientific socialism. Nobody else has anything better, not even His Nibs.”

Judy picked up the boys’ duffel bags and Marianne wheeled in her suitcase, laptop bag on her shoulder. The rest of their luggage, minimal anyway, would arrive later. The “suite” consisted of two rooms, each with a door to the outside and a connecting door of lumber so raw that fresh wood shavings lay on the floor beside it. The boys’ room had two beds, a cheap chest of crude pine, a table and four chairs. Hers was exactly the same except for a double bed. There were no closets, just pegs on the wall. There were bathrooms, one per bedroom, with showers but no tub. Blinds on the windows, no curtains, plain white blankets and pillows.

Judy said, “A hospital room has more charm. At least there you get flowers in plastic vases and nurses in scrubs with little duckies on them. Most of us only use our rooms to sleep—not, however, that the work buildings have any more pizzazz. Mess is the big building with ‘EATS’ spray-painted all over it, courtesy of a drunken night for some construction guys. Food is served pretty much all the time, and it’s not bad. Jonah doesn’t want the masses to rise up in culinary revolution.”

“Thanks,” Marianne said. “What else should I know?”

“Oh, tons and tons. But the first thing, since I see you unpacking your laptop, is that the site is Faraday shielded.”

Marianne stopped and looked at her. “What?”

“Jonah doesn’t want hackers getting any information whatsoever about our progress. There’s a big invisible shield, proprietary tech, over everything inside the inner fence. Nothing electronic gets in and nothing out.”

Marianne put her laptop back in its case. “We’re leaving.”

Judy laughed. “That’s everybody’s first reaction. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. The LAN is shielded, although I suppose eventually somebody will hack in somehow, because they always do. But there are computers in the mess with secure and encrypted underground cables and you can use those to communicate with the outside world. They’re monitored, though, so any communication you send outside will be read and your web surfing will be tracked. Come on outside so I can finish this cigarette without stinking up your rooms.”

Marianne followed Judy out the door. “Cell phones?”

“No.” Judy stopped smiling. “Look, I know it’s draconian, but Stubbins knows what he’s doing. He must trust you or you wouldn’t be here, and he told me I can be as open with you about project details as you can stand. I know you’re a geneticist, not a physicist or an engineer. We’re much farther along on the ship than Space X, the European Union, or China. India is hopeless. The Russians are our only competition and we can’t afford leaks of how we’re solving the problems associated with the Deneb plans. We have to be first.”

“Why?” Marianne said.

Judy stared at her. “You really are a trusting soul, aren’t you? Do you know what the Russian ship is called?”

“Stremlenie—the Endeavor.”

“That’s the public name. The top-secret project name is Mest’.”

“I don’t speak Russian.”

“It means ‘revenge.’”

Something tightened in Marianne’s chest. “If it’s top secret, how does Stubbins know that?”

“He knows. The Venture is private enterprise, but of course Stubbins works with Washington. Not openly, because every congressional district has way too many people who hate the Denebs, and lawmakers have this pesky need to get reelected. But Central Asia suffered more than anybody from the spore cloud. You’re a geneticist—you must know that. They lost more people to the plague, and the mouse die-off affected their crop ecology the most. And the current regime is so old-school tyrannical that they might as well be czars.”

“Yes.” Marianne was thinking furiously. Revenge—against World. Against Noah, against Smith, against Marianne’s half-Deneb grandchild. Against a star-faring section of humanity, who reported themselves as peaceful but who were capable of creating the technology that the Russians now wanted to use as a warship.

“Can the star drive be weaponized? Can it?”

Judy shrugged. “Nobody knows. It’s hard to convey to a non-physicist how alien these plans, and the physics behind them, really are. No, don’t look at me like that, I know the Denebs are human, not alien. But the thinking behind their tech is so strange to us that there is speculation it isn’t even theirs but came to them from somewhere else.”

Marianne’s mouth opened, then closed again without anything coming out.

“Just speculation,” Judy said. “And here’s more of the same, although this one is founded on some actual data. Did you ever wonder why the Denebs needed human scientists aboard the Embassy? Why not just get a few human lab-rat volunteers and work out the immunity issues by themselves? I’ve gone through every published article by every one of you who was aboard—Harrison Rice, Ahmed Rafat, Jessica Yu—and I got some biologist friends to do it with me. Every single breakthrough seems to have been made by Terrans, not Denebs. Don’t you see what that means? It means the same thing as bringing you human scientists aboard in the first place. When it comes to genetics, we know more than they do. So what other science have they gotten from somebody else, and are just piggybacking on?”

Marianne found her voice. “You sound like one of the conspiracy theorists out there. Damn it, Judy, I worked with these people. I was there!”

“I know you were. And I could be dead wrong. But I’m not the only scientist saying that. And whatever I suspect, or believe, or entertain as mad fantasy, doesn’t change a very real fact—no one knows what will happen the day we finish the ship and press the button to start her. Actually, we’re all grateful it is a button and not some peculiar thing we wouldn’t even recognize. The drive appears to harness the repulsion force of dark matter, and nobody on Earth understands that very well.”

Judy took a long final drag on her cigarette, dropped it on the ground, and turned her heel on it. Then, noting Marianne’s expression, she carefully picked it up, wrapped it in a tissue, and put it in her pocket. “I was on the Dark Energy Survey, incidentally, in the Strong Lensing work group, that ended up confirming the existence of dark energy. The survey got delayed because of funding problems after the collapse and also because of the totally inane… never mind. You aren’t interested in the politics. I’m not even interested anymore in the stupidity of the politicians involved. The point is that dark energy exists, or at least the mathematics say it does, and it seems to power the Deneb star drive, although nobody knows how.

“We’re doing things we don’t understand to Terran materials, processes that make baking nobium-3-tin into superconductors look like kindergarten play. A lot of that is going on in underground bunkers. The engineers are in control and we physicists struggle to keep up, which is a dead reversal of the normal order. It’s not just the blind leading the sighted, it’s like the blind pushing them over cliffs. And David Chin, project chief, is cliff-diving just as much as the rest of us, although don’t tell him I said so.”

Marianne said, “How do you know—”

“That we’re building it right? Of course we can’t really be sure, not to every tiny intended tolerance—the error bar on this project is the size of Rhode Island. All of which means that nobody understands the implications of what may or may not happen when we turn it on.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask. What if”—this was a stupid question but she had to ask it—“the star drive blows up Earth?”

“Aren’t you the one who keeps insisting the Denebs are our friends?”

“Yes, but if we somehow build it wrong… if we don’t understand the plans correctly…”

“It won’t blow up Earth,” Judy said. “We think.”

The physicist was grinning. Was she just playing with her? Marianne wasn’t sure she believed Judy. But then Judy said something that tipped the balance.

“We know enough to know what we don’t know—unlike the anti-alien yahoos out there—but we’re not completely ignorant. The physics fits with quantum theories and brane theory both, once you make certain radical adjustments in your thinking, and even with general relativity. Which, God knows, quantum mechanics didn’t. But the basic underlying idea for all of it seems to be that everything in the universe is interconnected in ways we hadn’t expected. Quarks and galaxies and time and spores and coffee spoons and consciousness. All of it.”

“That sounds religious.”

“It isn’t. I mean, yes, it is, but not in the way most people mean. But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

Judy’s eyes, small and dark in her broad face, pierced Marianne. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I didn’t used to think so, but I do now.” Since Colin’s revelations to her. A lot more was interconnected than she’d ever believed.

“I thought so. But that’s enough philosophy for now. You want a tour of this candy factory? Willy Wonka himself asked me to show you around.”

“Yes,” Marianne said again. “I want to see everything.”

The spaceship camp was the coolest place ever. Jason said so, and now Colin agreed.

It had so much stuff! Trucks and bulldozers and steam shovels like in Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Colin’s second favorite book. His favorite was still Brandon and the Elephant in the Basement, but probably there wasn’t an elephant here. Still, like Grandma said, you couldn’t have everything.

The camp had things to climb on, and Colin liked their teacher, and the spaceship was awesome. But best of all was Luke.

Mr. Stubbins brought him to Ms. Blake’s classroom, which was really just a room like Colin’s and Jason’s bedroom only with some tables, chairs, books, and computers. Grandma was there because it was their first morning. They were doing math. Ms. Blake was showing Jason something called multiplication, making little piles of polished stones. Colin wrote numbers on paper and drew little balls to show how many the numbers were. That was babyish but Ms. Blake explained that she needed to find out how much math Colin already knew, so she could teach him new things.

“Kids, Dr. Jenner,” Mr. Stubbins said, “this is Luke. He’s already been here a while, but this morning he was with me at the ship. Luke, this is Jason and Colin.”

Luke looked down at his sneakers, which seemed really new and clean. So were the rest of his clothes. He was big and moved slow, with crinkly hair the color of dry sand. When he raised his head, Colin saw that he looked afraid.

Mr. Stubbins said, “Say hello, Luke.”

“Hello,” Luke said. His voice was a little hard to understand.

“Hi,” Jason and Colin said.

“Hello,” Grandma said.

Luke didn’t answer or even look at anyone. Grandma said to Mr. Stubbins, “Traumatized, developmentally challenged, or Asperger’s?”

“All three. Be nice, Marianne.”

Colin said, “Grandma is always nice!”

“So she is,” Mr. Stubbins said. He talked different when he was around Grandma than he did to other people.

“A word, please,” Grandma said. “You, too, Allison.”

The three adults went into a corner and whispered hard at each other. Grandma waved her hands. Jason talked to Luke. “Do you live here?”

“Yes.” It seemed hard for him to say the word.

“It’s awesome, isn’t it? Where are your parents?” Jason said.

“Dead.”

“My mother is dead, too.”

Still Luke didn’t look at the boys. His face twisted like he had a pain. Jason said, “What’s wrong?”

“Too loud.”

Colin glanced out the window. All the machinery had stopped for lunch. “It’s quiet in here.”

Luke said, “The ground.”

Colin caught his breath. This was the kid that Ms. Blake said could hear the way Colin did! Right now Colin heard not only the ground but the plants outside and the electricity fence and some water deep under the building and a whole lot of other stuff. Could Luke hear it, too?

He said, “Do you hear plants? And storms coming?”

Then, for the first time, Luke did look at him. His eyes widened. “You can hear?”

“Yes! All those things! And not only that, I can show you how to block out the noise. You need to put it in rows….” Colin sat at the table and picked up the polished stones for Jason’s multiplication. He told Luke about putting the noises in rows in his mind, and that Luke should practice. Luke’s heavy face twisted with trying. Why was it so hard for him? And why hadn’t he thought of it himself? Colin had, before he could even remember. He went over it with Luke again, and then again. Grandma and Mr. Stubbins and Ms. Blake were still whispering shouts at each other. Jason got bored and went back to the math stuff on his worksheet.

Finally Luke’s eyes went round and he said, “Oh—”

“See? That’s better, right?”

Luke burst into tears and grabbed Colin’s hand. Colin was embarrassed but didn’t pull away. Luke wasn’t like Paul. He was going to be Colin’s friend, and Jason’s too, but Luke would be a friend who could hear the world, just like Colin did.

This really was the coolest place ever.

Sometimes it even made him forget what a bad person he was for crashing a tree branch onto Paul.

Judy and Marianne had become friends. In some mysterious way she reminded Marianne of Evan Blanford, although on the surface no two people could have been more different. Judy had given Marianne a complete tour of the Venture, but Marianne still understood very little about the ship being constructed on a reinforced-concrete launchpad. She was staggered by how close to completion the vessel was. A gleaming silvery cylinder with odd projections, it looked far too fragile to withstand liftoff through the atmosphere. Apparently some version of the Deneb energy shield activated during liftoff, protecting it. She was also surprised by the ship’s small size. Had Smith’s compatriots lived in such cramped quarters for the voyage to Earth? And could the Venture launch something as large and complex as the Embassy had been?

“No,” Judy said. “We haven’t found anything that would suggest that capability. What we have here is an abridged version of the alien tech. Either they didn’t want to share the full monte, or they adapted everything so we poor knuckle-draggers can actually build the thing. Prometheus handing down fire but not the Franklin stove.”

The more Marianne saw, the more questions she had. Three things, however, were completely clear.

First, the ship was the kind of massive, coordinated, expensive engineering effort that could only have been built by someone with complete control of the project, a fabulous fortune plus the ability to borrow even more money, and freedom from all committees, including Congress. If Stubbins was working with Washington, as Judy had said, it didn’t interfere with his ability to make, modify, reverse, or implement decisions as he alone saw fit.

Second, Stubbins’s staff were an eclectic lot. The only world-class physicist was David Chin, from Stanford, second in command. The rest of the physicists and astronomers, like Judy, were steady and unremarkable craftsmen who were probably not going to move humanity closer to understanding how World’s star drive worked. The engineers were drawn from various enterprises, as were the workmen and tech staff. “Stubbins looked for people who really want to go to the stars themselves,” Judy said. “Because of course we’re all hoping to be picked for ship’s crew, eventually. Also people who can be trusted completely. Stubbins wants no doubters, no betrayers, no leaks.”

And might not get any. Marianne had never seen such tight security, except on the Embassy. She spent a fair amount of time on the computers in the mess, even though she knew her every keystroke was monitored. She found no information whatsoever about Luke, whom Stubbins said was “found in an orphanage.” Luke, like Colin, was able to hear in infrasonic and ultrasonic ranges. What did Stubbins want with him? What did Stubbins want with Colin?

She couldn’t ask him directly. Ever since her first morning here, when he’d come to the kids’ classroom (and why do that personally?), he’d been off-site. Judy didn’t know where.

“Washington, maybe,” she said. “David Chin keeps everything rolling along.”

They sat outside Marianne’s barracks on utilitarian metal folding chairs, there being nothing as frivolous as lawn chairs available, in a gorgeous November sunset. Both women huddled in heavy sweaters but the sunset was too good to miss. Gold, red, and an orange like ripe fruit faded slowly from the western horizon. The first stars pricked the dark blue above. A short distance off, Allison supervised the three boys, who climbed on a pallet of metal girders. The children became silhouettes against the sky, and a soft breeze brought, instead of the usual machine oil and dust, a fugitive scent of wild grapes. A hawk wheeled in the sky.

“I don’t see how World could be any lovelier than this,” Marianne said, before she knew she was going to say anything at all. The next moment she thought of what a small percentage of Earth this represented, while so much of the rest of it was struggling, starving, flooding, rioting, or all of the above. The Internet news just got worse and worse. She didn’t say any of this. Why spoil the moment?

Judy was hunched over an embroidery hoop, of all things; she said that embroidering flowers relaxed her. People were endlessly surprising in their hidden corners.

Marianne said, “How can you even see what you’re doing? The light’s mostly gone.”

“Yeah. I’ve pricked my finger twice.” She folded up her work and said abruptly, “Why do you think Stubbins is so hot to go to World?”

“I’ve wondered about that myself. I imagine he smells profit. He’s proven to have a good nose for it.”

“A lame pun. But profit of what kind? You know him better than I do, Marianne.”

“I don’t think anybody really knows him.”

“Yeah. ‘A grand, ungodly, godlike man,’” Judy said, making air quotes with both hands. Her embroidery slipped off her lap and fell onto the ground.

Marianne said, “I don’t recognize the quote.”

“Ah, you scientists. Deficient in the humanities.”

“Come on, Judy—you’re a scientist, too.”

“Yes, but only by default. I wanted to be an English professor.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“An overcrowded and underpaid field. But Melville remains my first love.”

“So—Ahab,” Marianne guessed.

“Correct. Ahab and our very own silver whale. As long as I don’t end up being Ishmael.”

“Let me ask you something,” Marianne said, because she’d been wondering on and off. “Do you think Stubbins uses those pheromone concoctions of his—I’m In Charge or whatever it’s called—to get people to come here and carry out his wishes?”

“You’re not the first to ask. My opinion is no, but who understands where the line is between pheromonal influence and the power of suggestion? Or the lure of plain old power? It isn’t—Uh-oh, visitors to the Pequod, escorted by the captain himself.”

Three figures emerged from the dusk. Stubbins hit a wall switch behind Marianne and a floodlight shattered the sweet gloom. Marianne blinked in the sudden harsh light, waiting for her eyes to adjust. When they had, she blinked again.

Oh, the poor things!

The woman and child with Stubbins, clearly mother and daughter, were both incredibly ugly. They had sallow skin, lips so thin they almost disappeared, and small eyes set too close together. Both of their lower faces sloped back so abruptly that they seemed to have no chins. The girl, who looked about six, also had a low forehead covered with bangs, so that her nose seemed to fill her entire truncated face.

“Marianne, Judy, meet my fiancée, Belinda Parker, and her daughter Ava. We got ourselves engaged this morning.”

It was a moment before Marianne could find her voice. Until three months ago, Stubbins had been married to an ex–super model, the fourth Mrs. Stubbins. All his wives except the first had been leggy blondes, so perfect in face and body that they scarcely seemed human. If Stubbins was engaged to Belinda, she must have something he desperately wanted. More money? Was he running out of funds to finish and launch the starship? But if Belinda was an heiress or ultra-rich widow, why hadn’t she paid for plastic surgery for, if not herself, this pathetic child?

Manners took over. Marianne stood and held out her hand. “Congratulations, both of you. Welcome to the Venture, Belinda.”

“Thank you.” The woman, unsmiling, studied Marianne and Judy. Ava gazed down at her shoes, which looked orthopedic. Judy rose and added her congratulations, her eyes glowing with curiosity.

Stubbins said, “Ava, here comes your teacher, lil’ darling. And here come your classmates. Hooboy, Ms. Blake, you’re sure enough going to have your hands full now! Jason, Colin, Luke, Ava.” He pointed to each as if choosing melons at a fruit stand.

The four children stared at each other. This is not going well, Marianne thought.

“You wanna play a video game?” Jason asked, and in his voice Marianne heard the echo of his uncle Noah, always quick to compassion. “We got Ataka! That means ‘attack’!”

Ava said, “Nah.” And then, fiercely, “I don’t know how.”

“I’ll show you. C’mon, Luke and Colin, let’s teach her.”

The boys started indoors. Ava didn’t move. Marianne waited for Belinda to say something like, “Go on, honey,” but Belinda said nothing. Finally Stubbins said, “Go on now, lil’ darlin’, y’all have fun with your new lil’ friends.”

Ava raised her face to glare at him, then followed Jason. Belinda continued to study Marianne. Finally she said, “Yer grandkids? They can hear spirits, too, huh? What’d he promise you to get here? How high was yer price?”

Judy’s eyes widened. Belinda raised her left hand. On the fourth finger gleamed a huge diamond, glinting in the floodlight. Belinda’s misshapen face looked as fierce as her daughter’s, but in the woman’s eyes shone the light of pure, unadulterated crazy.

The new girl looked strange. Luke was slow in his head—Grandma had explained it carefully—and Colin was a bad person because he’d deliberately hurt Paul with that tree branch, maybe even killed him although everybody said no. Ava wasn’t slow or bad—at least, if she was, he didn’t know it yet—but she was really ugly. All three of them weren’t normal, only Jason was. But the starship camp was a good place for people who weren’t normal, because here everybody was kind. So Colin had to be kind to Ava.

“We got an extra remote,” Jason said, handing it to her and plopping himself down on the floor before the big computer screen. “This game is Russian but it’s not hard to understand. First you gotta pick a character…”

Ava hit the remote from his hand and it fell on the floor. “I don’t wanna play.”

“Okay, what do you wanna do?”

“I’ll play. I’m just telling you I don’t wanna.”

Luke looked bewildered. “If you don’t wanna, then why—”

“Stubbins says I have to. You was there. Are you a retard or something?”

“Hey,” Jason said, at the same moment that Luke said simply, “Yes.”

Ava’s face changed. She peered at Luke from her small eyes and then turned on Jason. “And what’s wrong with you?”

Jason said, “You apologize to Luke!”

“It’s okay,” Luke said.

“No, it isn’t. We don’t call people derogatory names!” Jason said. Colin recognized Grandma’s words.

Ava said, with unexpected meekness, “Sorry, Luke. But you’re a… you’re slow, and I’m ugly. So what’s the problem, you two?”

Colin saw that Ava was making a club, like the clubs at his old school. Paul had a club at recess and he’d said that Colin couldn’t belong. But Colin and Jason belonged here, and so did Luke. If Luke was in this club of people with problems, then Colin wanted to be, too. He had to tell Ava something, or she and Luke would be in the club and he and Jason would not.

“Well?” Ava demanded.

Jason said, “We don’t have any problems!” Which wasn’t true. Colin didn’t want his brother to be a liar, and he did want to be in the club. So he said, “I hear things.”

“What things? Voices? Like my mother? My mother is wacko. She hears angels and demons.”

Colin blinked. But he’d started this, and he was going to finish it. “Not voices. I hear the ground.”

Ava’s squinty little eyes widened and her mouth fell open. One tooth was black. “Really? You’re fucking with me!”

More words Grandma wouldn’t like, but Colin let it go. “No. It’s the truth. I can hear the ground. So can Luke. And plants, too,” he added, in case the ground wasn’t enough to get him into the club. As soon as he was in, he’d figure out how to get Jason in, too.

Ava swung her head to look at Luke, then back at Colin. And then she burst into sobs. She covered her face with her hands and sunk to the floor, sitting on the remote. She sobbed and sobbed, and after a moment of fright, Luke reached out with his big pale hand and patted her skinny hunched back, over and over.

CHAPTER 21

S plus 6.5 years

Two months later, the ship was nearly complete. Workmen riveted and shouted in the main compartments, engineers tested displays on the pristine bridge, everyone viewed the containers being loaded into the hold. There were a lot of these, including food, mostly freeze-dried, for twenty-one people for three months.

Marianne said to Judy, “How do you know you need three months? Or twenty-one people?”

“We don’t.” Judy’s fingers flew over a keyboard, crunching some data incomprehensible to Marianne. They had stopped by Judy’s “office,” a cubicle in the raw-wood building closest to the ship. Everyone called the building “the command center,” although the commander, Jonah Stubbins, and his second, David Chin, actually worked elsewhere. This cavernous, ugly building was filled with scientists and engineers, working furiously on computers or arguing tensely across cheap conference tables. There were a lot of arguments. Marianne, who had never been around so much as a garden shed being built, let alone a starship from plans nobody fully understood, had begun to think the Venture would never get off the ground. Not unless it could be fueled by sheer hot air.

She said, “You don’t know how long it will take to get to World?”

“Wait just a moment… I just have to… there.” Judy turned her attention to Marianne. Judy looked tired, the broad planes of her face drawn down in sags. She wore overalls and another of her exquisitely embroidered silk shirts; the effect was of the world’s richest handyman. “We’re pretty sure the star drive distorts the fabric of space-time and that it won’t take much time at all to arrive at World. Of course, ‘not much time at all’ is a matter of debate, like everything else around here. But we don’t know how long we need to be there, or who will stay on the ship, or what. There are sleeping cubicles in the design for twenty-one people, so twenty-one people go.”

“From everything I’ve read, Terran space travel was planned with ships that were self-sufficient biosystems, at least as much as possible. Hydroponic tanks for growing food, algae-based air scrubbing, waste recycling. The Venture doesn’t have that.”

“There will be plants aboard,” Judy said.

“But it won’t be a sustainable closed biosystem.”

“We never got that to work even on Earth. You know that, Marianne.”

“So that means that nobody stayed aboard the mother ship when the Denebs came to New York seven years ago. It was empty.”

“That seems to be what it means, yes.” Judy grinned, a weary grin. “I know what you want to ask. So ask it.”

“Okay. Who are the twenty-one?”

“Nobody knows. Stubbins isn’t saying. Except, of course, for David Chin.”

“Do you want to go?”

Judy gave her a duh look. “Of course I want to go. Everybody here—well, most everybody—wants to go. But I don’t think my chances are good, not for the first trip. We’re all hoping for subsequent trips. What we want is a bus route to the stars, with regularly scheduled commuter routes. Don’t you want to go?”

Marianne said slowly, “I don’t know. Noah is there, but Ryan and Elizabeth and the boys are here, and—”

“I forgot—you’re a breeder. Well, that does tie you to terra firma, doesn’t it?”

“Judy, why am I really here? What does Stubbins want with Luke and Ava and Colin?”

Judy grasped Marianne’s shoulder. “Put on your coat and let’s go on over to the mess. I’m starving.”

Outside, Judy spoke in a low voice as rapid as her stride. For a short woman, she could move amazingly fast. “Nobody knows what Stubbins wants with those kids. Believe me, there’s a lot of speculation. Luke’s been here since site selection. So you tell me: What’s special about these three kids? Is it true that they can hear in infrasonic and ultrasonic ranges?”

“It’s true of Colin and Luke. I don’t know about Ava. She doesn’t talk to me.”

“She doesn’t talk to anyone but the other kids. A prickly pear, that one. But Stubbins wanted her badly enough to pretend he’s going to marry her mother. He never will, of course. Why don’t you ask him why he wants these kids? You’re the one with a right to know.”

“God, I’ve tried!” Marianne said. “I can’t get to him. When he’s on site, and I actually succeed in finding him, he’s rushing off to somewhere else, hollering folksy crap at me over his shoulder. ‘Catch you soon, lil’ lady!’ And Belinda—she’s not here, either. She’s off getting reconstructive surgery for her face, which was apparently her price for coming here. Ava’s next.”

“Well, that’s good. That poor kid needs—What the fuck?”

Sirens sounded all over camp: three short blasts and one long, over and over. Security had conducted extensive drills; this pattern meant “not a drill”! Marianne, with Judy panting behind her, took off at a dead run for the underground bunker where Allison Blake would take the children. The bunkers were small and crude, except for communications, but they could protect everybody from anything less than ballistic missiles.

The attackers had ballistic missiles.

Packed into the rocky caverns, shivering without their coats, the four children pressed close to her and Allison. Marianne put her coat around Colin and Ava, the smallest two, without taking her eyes off the bunker’s LAN-fed TV. The ground underneath her was hard and damp; moisture dripped along the walls; Ava clutched Marianne’s arm hard enough that the girl’s untrimmed nails drew pinpoints of blood. Marianne felt none of it. Her gaze never left CNN.

Minutes ago a short-range tactical missile—“possibly a Scud” said the visibly shaken newscaster—had hit the California site of SpaceX. Images of twisted wreckage, burning buildings. On the Internet, credit was being claimed by ACWAK, No Contact with Alien Killers.

Judy said raggedly, “A Scud! Those things can carry nuclear warheads. This one must’ve carried only conventional explosives… ‘only,’ Christ, listen to me… fuck them to hell!”

Marianne said, “How could an American hate group get a Scud?”

“Oh, fuck, Marianne, the Russians sold them to everybody. Congo had Scuds. They’ve been drifting around ever since, sold and resold on the black market. They can be launched from mobile launchers and their accuracy within, say, fifty miles isn’t too bad. Although these fuckers got really lucky, the—”

Colin said in a small voice, “You’re saying bad words.”

“Sorry, kid.”

Jason said, “Is that spaceship all the way wrecked?”

“Yes,” Marianne said. She pried Ava’s nails off her hand. But we’re completely safe, she wanted to say—but was it true? She turned her full attention to the children.

“Listen, all of you. Mr. Stubbins has really, really good security here. You know that. I don’t think any missiles will ever get to his ship. We’re—”

“But you ain’t all the way sure,” Ava said, with a mixture of defiance and fear that tore at Marianne’s heart.

“No,” she said. “Nobody can know exactly. But I’m pretty sure, and meanwhile we’re going to stay down here until the all-clear sounds.”

Allison said, “Yes, and we’re going to play a game. See—I’ve got the Fantasy Fighters deck right here. It’s like online, only more fun. Ava, what character do you want to be?”

Ava said, “Snot Thrower.”

Marianne watched Allison skillfully engage all four children, arranging them with their backs to the TV. Bless Allison. Marianne turned back to the screen. Initial reports put at least twenty-seven dead at the SpaceX site. The ship was a total loss.

There had been seven “Deneb ships” being built in the world. Now there were six.

The missile had been a modified SS-1e Scud-D, carrying a high-explosive warhead, fired from a mobile launcher twenty-five kilometers away. The launcher was quickly found. The three men on it were dead by their own hands. They wore ACWAK uniforms.

Judy and Marianne sat in the mess hall at midnight, the only ones there. The scientists, engineers, and workmen at the Venture site went to bed early, woke up early, worked long hours. Benjamin Franklin would have been proud of them. A bottle of scotch rested on the table between the women, and a salad plate overflowed with Judy’s cigarette butts.

Judy said, “We should have anticipated this. The Russians sold Scuds to every third-world country they could.”

Marianne said, “We’re not a third-world country.”

Judy gazed around the cinder-block mess hall, with its cheap metal tables and chairs, its scattered computers with their monitoring systems to spy on anyone who used them. “Are you sure about that?”

“Third-world countries can’t build anything like the Venture.”

“No. But then, the good old US of A isn’t building it, is she?” Judy sipped her coffee. “Jonah Stubbins is.”

Marianne didn’t answer.

Judy said, “Oh, Christ, here comes Ahab. Look, say you were smoking these, all right? I’m in enough trouble as is.” With a single fluid motion she was off the bench, across the room, and out the opposite door.

Stubbins didn’t seem to notice her departure. Nor did he comment on the cigarette butts. He stood in the doorway, gave a small lurch, and then stumbled toward Marianne. Plopping heavily onto the bench, he fumbled for Judy’s glass, knocked it over, and gestured toward the scotch.

He was, Marianne realized, toweringly, monumentally drunk.

“Gimme drink, sweetheart.”

Marianne didn’t want to be alone with Stubbins in this state. She smiled, pushed the scotch toward him—only a few fingers’ worth remained in the bottle—and said good night.

“Stay a minute. Damn Scuds—next time that could be my ship.”

The sudden pain on his face cut through his sloppy drunkenness like detergent through grease. Marianne suddenly realized this could be an opportunity to obtain information from Stubbins. In vino veritas. It had sometimes worked with Kyle, although the information she got from her alcoholic ex-husband never turned out to be anything she wanted to hear.

But before she could frame her first question, Stubbins said, “Sweetheart, you know why I’m so rich?”

“Don’t call me that, please. We are not sweethearts.”

He laughed, a loud bray. “No. But damn, I shoulda married somebody like you, not those bimbos I allus picked.”

“Belinda is hardly a bimbo.”

“No. She’s a shark. Bes’ negoti… negotit… bargainer I ever saw.”

Marianne could believe that. Belinda had bargained herself into reconstructive surgery and probably a big financial settlement. Marianne said, “About the Venture—”

“Too bad I can’t use Belinda on World,” Stubbins said. “Might need good bargainers. Swee—Marianne, know why Earth’s going to hell?”

There were several things she could have answered, but before she said anything, Stubbins was off. He held his glass—Judy’s glass, which he’d filled with the last of the scotch—so loosely that Marianne kept expecting it to fall from his huge hands and smash.

“World going to hell ’cause-a Darwin.”

She hadn’t expected that. “Darwin? Charles or Erasmus?”

“Don’ go cute-intellectual on me. Charles. Survi’al of the fittest. People don’ take responsibility for themselves, expect everybody else to do it for them. Unfit don’ deserve to survive.”

“So you’d murder, or murder by neglect, people born ‘unfit’ who might turn out to be Beethoven.”

“Beethoven—you liberals allus bring up Beethoven. Or Temple Grandin. No, thass not what I mean. Physically unfit is nothin’, tech makes that irrel… unrel… don’ matter. I mean unfit to take the risks and pay the price of movin’ forward. Capitalism, I mean. The pure thing. And bringin’ society along with you.”

“Far too often,” Marianne said, “the capitalist risk-takers have had other people pay the price. A risk to mine ore, but the miners get the cave-ins and black lung. A risk to finance a railroad, but Chinese laborers die laying the tracks through mountains and across deserts. A risk to finance nuclear power, but the officials and scientists don’t live anywhere near the reactors. A risk to—”

“Would you rather be without the ore and railroads and power?”

She was silent.

“You’re an honest woman,” Stubbins said, somehow managing to sound both more articulate but no less drunk. “Naïve but honest. So answer me honest. Would the country be better oof—I mean, better off without steel and railroads and airplanes and power grids? Would you wanna live in a country without ’em?”

“No,” she said reluctantly, “but—”

“No ‘buts.’”

“Jonah, that’s what people like you never see! There are always ‘buts’! Every issue is complex, shades of gray, not black and white.”

“Oh, I see that. I jus’ don’ get lost in gray.”

“But—”

“If human beings gonna survive, it’ll be because somebody took risks. Big risks. Your own speeches said that.”

“Yes, but I meant the risks of building the government spaceship, of going to World—”

“Which I’m doin’.”

“Yes, you are. But Jonah—what else are you doing? After we arrive? What risks are you going to take, and with whose lives?”

For a breathless moment she actually thought he was going to answer her. His face changed, going from the triumph of his supposed victory in their debate to an expression quieter, more somber. But all he said was, “That coulda been my ship blown up by those Scuds.”

She said, “Pure capitalism is one of the most exploitive and inhumane economic systems ever invented.”

He grinned. “Hobbled capitalism gets nothin’ done.”

“Depends on what you want to do.”

“Absolutely right,” he said. “And on somebody with the guts to do it.”

“Ivan the Terrible had guts.”

“But no vision.” Stubbins stared into the middle distance—at a vision only he could see? Or merely at the squinty illusions of someone too drunk to make sense?

Then he added, with one of the lightning changes that so bewildered her, “I give back, Marianne. I do good while makin’ profits. And ‘profit’ ain’t a dirty word.”

“I never said—”

“As good as said.” And then, as if mourning a lover, “Poor bastards. And that coulda been my ship. No way. Never let it happen.”

“Good night, Jonah.”

“My ship. No way.” He raised bloodshot eyes to hers. “Never.”

Colin’s dreams had gotten worse. Now he had three bad dreams: Daddy being more trapped underground than Brandon’s elephant. Paul killed by Colin’s tree branch. And now large purple monsters blowing up the Venture. If that happened, Colin would never get to ride on it. Jason said they probably wouldn’t get to ride on it anyway, but Colin didn’t believe him.

Daytime was a lot better, especially since Ava came. Jason was their leader because he was the oldest, but the other three could hear the ground and plants and everything. Colin didn’t have to teach Ava how to arrange the noises in rows. She was better at it than he was. She could hear more sounds, too, and she knew what more of them meant. Colin was jealous.

But Ava couldn’t read, not even the few words Luke knew. She was smart, she told the boys, but something was wrong with her brain. Letters and numbers just went “swimming” in front of her eyes and wouldn’t stay still long enough for her to make sense of them.

Colin pictured the alphabet with fins and goggles, swimming all over the page. He could see how that would make reading hard.

Ms. Blake tried. She guided Ava’s hand to draw letters in sand, so that Ava’s muscles would learn the letters even if her brain couldn’t. It didn’t help, and school had finished with Ava throwing sand at everybody and screaming bad words at Ms. Blake.

On a clear, cool day the four children lay on a patch of weedy ground behind a building and a tiny woods. They were pretty near the inside fence, which had barbed wire on it but no electricity like the outside fence, where the guards walked. Colin, Luke, and Ava pressed their ears to the ground while Jason kept watch.

“Hear that sort of thump-thump-whistle-thump?” Ava said.

“Yeah,” Colin said. “That’s the biomass saying that something not-too-big is walking around.”

“Us,” Luke said proudly. A week and a half of comparing what they’d figured out about the plant signals going through the soil, and they all knew more than before. Even Luke, who had much less trouble remembering this than how much was six plus two.

“Duh,” Ava said. “What else?”

Colin said, “That tree over there wants water.”

“Duh again. Everybody knows that. You’re such a baby, Colin.”

“Am not!” Colin said. To prove it, he hit her.

“Stop that!” Ava screamed. “If you don’t, I’ll sneak into your room and dump gasoline on you and set you on fire, so help me Lord!”

Luke shuddered, but Jason just rolled his eyes. Colin was a little scared, but he said, “You can’t.”

“Yes, I can!”

“I’ll… I’ll make a tree fall on you!”

The three of them looked at him. Jason frowned—was he remembering the tree branch that fell on Paul? Colin said desperately, “I’m sorry, Ava. Look—I’ll… I’ll do those alphabet letters Ms. Blake told you to write for homework.”

“She’ll know it were you and not me, dummy.”

“I’ll write them all wobbly so she’ll think it was you.”

“And then when I cain’t write them in school she’ll know it warn’t me.”

Colin didn’t know what to say next. But Luke did. He said, “The sounds can teach Ava her letters.”

“What?” Jason said.

“That’s how I learned. It’s hard, but if you make lines when the sounds come… I can’t say the words.”

“Then show us,” Jason said. He jumped up and found a discarded stick, one of the many splinters of lumber lying all over the camp. He handed it to Luke, who took it helplessly.

Luke said, “Don’t look at me. I don’t like it when people look at me.”

“Okay,” Jason said. He looked at the dirt beneath the stick. Colin and Ava, arms folded scornfully across her chest, did the same.

“Well,” Luke said slowly. “Remember that whistle? From the tree past the fence?”

“Yeah,” Ava said, “it wants water. So what?”

“I think that sound in my mind and I make these lines because Ms. Feldman said that it starts ‘tree.’” Carefully, as if the two lines had no connection with each other, he drew a line and a top: T.

Ava said doubtfully, “But do those lines always start tree? Or do it change?”

“I think always.”

Colin felt a sudden jolt in his head, like his mind sat down too hard. Luke couldn’t sound out words, couldn’t see how letters spelled things. Luke only memorized lines which didn’t mean anything to him, because he’d made letters go in some sort of rows in his head, connected to sounds that weren’t the letters’ sounds. And Ava couldn’t even do that, unless Luke could teach her.

Luke did, with enormous patience. After half an hour, Ava could draw T, V, and A, and write her name. Good thing it was so short! But when Colin, wanting to help, asked her to name things that started with T, she hit him again.

“Ow! Stop that!”

“Then stop trying to teach me! You cain’t! Only Luke can!”

“Someone’s coming,” Jason said. Colin heard it; the subtle change in the background noise of air and ground. Footsteps. Colin even knew whose.

“Well, young’uns, here y’all are. Your grandma and Ms. Blake say to come on in, you’re late for dinner. Having fun out here?”

“Yes, sir,” Jason said.

“Good, good. Come on in now. Don’t want the womenfolk mad, do we?” He lumbered off.

Ava looked after him with eyes sparkling with hatred.

Jason said. “Why don’t you like him?”

“He’s bad. Bad, bad, bad! He don’t love Mama, he don’t even like her, he said he’ll marry her just so’s he can get me. And he don’t like me neither. He just uses me for all those tests while Mama’s gone to the hospital to get her face fixed. I’m sick of tests all the time. Even if Devil Stubbins’s gonna fix my face, too.”

Fix her face? And her mother’s face? Could Mr. Stubbins do that? Colin thought Mr. Stubbins could only build spaceships. And he’d never seen Mr. Stubbins do anything bad.

She said, “Just ’cause my mama’s crazy don’t mean he should treat her like he do.”

“What does he—”

“Oh, shut up, Colin, you’re such a baby.” She stalked off. Colin didn’t understand any of it. It was the first thing he didn’t even want to understand.

Ms. Blake was sick with something. She was in the infirmary, which was a little hospital in camp, littler than the one Daddy was in or the one where Ava’s mama was away getting her face fixed. Colin liked Ms. Blake and hoped she got better, but the great thing was that Grandma didn’t know yet that the teacher was sick. So after some grown-up came to their classroom to tell them that and then left again, nobody told them where they were supposed to be.

“We should go find Grandma,” Jason said.

“No!” Colin said. He was mad at Grandma today. She’d found them all playing Ataka! and asked them where they got it. When Jason said “From Mr. Stubbins,” Grandma’s mouth got all pressed together and she made them show her how to play it. Then she said it was too violent and deleted it off the player, and it was Colin’s best game. He was almost to the third level.

Jason nodded. He was mad at Grandma, too. He said, “Then let’s go on a hike. We’ll take provisions.”

Colin didn’t know what “provisions” were but they turned out just to be food: apples and water bottles and some stolen cookies. The children slipped between buildings, trying to not be seen, until they were at the edge of camp. Then they crawled across a place with deep grass, pretending that bad guys were after them. Then they ran into the tiny woods and collapsed, laughing. Jason tossed everybody an apple.

Ava let hers roll away. She said, “There’s people down there.”

Colin, still holding his apple, tipped himself over and pressed his ear to the ground. Ava was right.

Jason said, “What do you hear?”

“People,” Ava said. “In a cave.”

Colin nodded. They’d all listened to the underground buildings all over camp, most of which were filled with machinery. They also listened to a few real caves, small spaces that Grandma said were mostly filled with mud. This cave was like the underground bunkers for attacks but bigger. Colin said, “People are down there—and mouses! I mean, mice!”

“Cool!” Jason said. “How many mice?”

“Lots,” Luke said. “I wish we could see them.”

“Well, we can’t,” Jason said. “Because then the people would see us.”

Ava said, her ear pressed to the dirt, “Them people are mad.”

They were; Colin could hear it, too. Not real words, but angry noises. He didn’t like to listen to angry people, so he was glad when Jason said, “You know what—let’s look for mice up here!”

“Yeah!” Luke said.

They walked around under the trees, Colin, Luke, and Ava as carefully and quietly as they could, listening hard. Jason kept lookout. Colin found a mouse first, not underground but scurrying across a little clearing. “Look, there!” But by the time the others turned their heads, the mouse was gone. Still, Colin had seen it clearly: a tiny brown mouse with a black stripe down its back, little ears, and a really long tail.

Ava said, “Over here!”

The boys raced to her. The only thing to see was a small hole in the ground, but when Colin, Ava, and Luke put their ears to the ground, they could hear them clearly.

“Six babies,” Luke said. “They want their mommy.”

“Let’s wait to see her come home,” Jason said.

They settled down around the hole and waited. Colin got thirsty, but he didn’t want to move until Jason said to. Finally Jason said, “She’s not coming home. And we have to go back.”

They got to their feet. The walk back wasn’t as much fun as the hike out. But still, it was a good day. Mice were a lot more interesting than people, even angry people underground. And Jason said they could come back every day to check on the baby mice. Maybe the mother mouse would even come home while they were there. Maybe the babies could be pets. And maybe he’d see that other mouse again, the striped one.

Colin was really glad that mice were back in the world.

Marianne visited Ryan every two weeks. A helicopter took her directly from the Venture site to Oakwood Gardens. Ryan never seemed either better or worse. Marianne carried on a mostly one-sided conversation with her son, although she could see he was trying to be present for her, trying to fight his way up from the dark cave into which he had fallen. When the effort exhausted him too much, she left, still smiling, careful to not let her face collapse until she was outside. On a day of wind, threatening snow, she was hurrying across the frozen lawn on her way back to the waiting chopper when Tim Saunders suddenly materialized at her elbow.

She gasped, “How did you get in here?”

“Climbed the fence. Security here is shit. Marianne, I gotta talk to you. It’s urgent.”

Looking at him, Marianne felt a faint echo of the desire that had propelled her for so long. Tim looked good: tanned, lean, his blue eyes intense as always under the tousled fall of mahogany hair. But the echo was faint. And nothing in his face said that he was rushing back to her out of unconquerable love.

“Okay. Talk.” It came out harsher than she intended.

“Yeah, here is good. But first… just let me…” He moved toward her, his hands moving over her body. She jumped back, but then realized he was checking her clothes for trackers. He found one. Carefully he removed it, carried it several yards away, and laid it on the winter grass.

Marianne was outraged—how dare Stubbins? But then she realized she was not as outraged as she should be. A Scud had just destroyed the SpaceX ship. Stubbins needed every single precaution, and privacy versus security was an old, old story.

Tim returned. “Tell your chopper pilot—who’s looking at us hard—that I’m an old flame still carrying the torch, okay? I’ll say this quick. You know I never liked that Earth for Humans gunman outside your apartment right as you came home, or that kid who knew Colin’s real name at his school—both just felt hinky. So I’ve been digging.”

Marianne, already cold in the January wind, went colder.

“The gunman got caught on the building security camera and I—”

“How did you get access to those recordings?”

Tim didn’t even bother to answer. “Got a photo of the guy, did some asking around. He does work for a man who sometimes gets things done for Stubbins. Okay, that’s not much to go on. But the kid who knew Colin’s name and all about you, Paul Tyson, his father is a vice president of something at Stubbins’s Manhattan sales headquarters for the perfumes. And Tyson’s a very old friend of old Jonah himself. And he—no, don’t turn away, listen to me—just got promoted to head honcho on the research project Stubbins is running at his big pharma company in Colorado to find a drug to help all those kids born since the spore cloud. Even though Tyson has no research background.”

“What drug? I didn’t hear about this.”

“Since when does Stubbins tell about his drugs until they’re on the market? That’s gonna be a huge market, a drug that can block unwanted sounds for those kids without turning them into zombies like Calminex does.”

“If anything like that were in the works, Harrison would know about it.”

“Maybe he does. Did you ask him?”

She hadn’t. Tim made a gesture of impatience that she remembered all too well.

“Focus, Marianne. I’m telling you that I think Stubbins arranged both the gunman threat and the Paul kid in order to get you to the Venture site.”

“Why would he do that? I could have gone on writing his web and broadcast content from Manhattan.”

“I don’t know why. That’s for you to find out.”

Marianne wrapped her arms around her body for warmth. “It all seems pretty circumstantial to me.”

“Uh-huh. And you seem like the trusting idiot you’ve always been.” His face softened. “The smartest idiot, though. Listen, I have to go—your pilot is barreling over here to rescue you. I just wanted you to have all the info.” He ran off, faster than the middle-aged and overweight pilot could possibly follow.

Marianne intercepted the pilot and fed him Tim’s romantic lies. Was Tim being paranoid about Stubbins? As her bodyguard, paranoia had been his job description. But… was he right?

She needed to have a talk with Jonah Stubbins. This time, she would keep hunting until she found him.

CHAPTER 22

S plus 6.5 years

The mice were disappointing. The mother mouse did not come home, the striped mouse did not reappear, and the baby mice stayed underground where Colin could hear them but not see them.

The children sat yet again around the mouse hole, waiting for something to happen. Colin was cold, even though he had on his parka and Grandma kept saying how warm this winter was. The trees above them had no leaves, except for the Christmas trees and one big tree with dead brown leaves that just stayed on it and didn’t fall. The little woods had no color, not even in the sky, except for some red berries that Grandma said were poison. Maybe Ms. Blake got sick because she ate the red berries. But she was a teacher so wouldn’t she know better? Colin was worried about Ms. Blake. She was still in the infirmary. Colin had gone there and pressed his ear to the building and he heard lots of things—people, machines, plants—but not Ms. Blake’s voice. He missed it. And he never even saw any mice.

“This is stupid,” Ava said. “We been here a really long time.”

“You only came with us once before,” Jason said, “but we’ve been here lots, waiting. So you can wait, too.”

“It ain’t my fault if Devil Stubbins needed me for more fucking tests!”

“Don’t use bad words,” Colin said.

“Will if I want to.”

“Luke doesn’t like it,” Jason said.

Ava looked from Colin to Luke. It was true that Luke didn’t like any kind of fighting or cursing. And it was also true that Ava liked Luke best, even though he was slow and Jason was their leader. Ava was always kind to Luke. Colin didn’t understand that but at least it was something good. He went back to watching the mouse hole.

And then he heard it. “Shhhh! She’s coming!”

All four children froze. Luke and Ava turned just their heads, their bodies still, in the direction of the noise. Jason followed their gaze. He couldn’t hear what Colin heard, the high screeeeee, but in another minute they all saw her.

The mommy mouse staggered from a bunch of dead leaves toward the hole. She fell down, got up, fell down again. Her brown fur—no long stripe on her back, she was just a regular mouse—was all weird, standing up in patches. She was really skinny. All at once her body started to shake hard as she kept making that awful noise: Screeeeeeeeee! And then she gave a huge shake and lay still.

Nobody spoke until Jason said, “I think she’d dead.”

Ava said, “I don’t see no blood.”

“Maybe she died of sickness,” Jason said.

Colin didn’t like that, because of Ms. Blake. What if she died, too? He stared at the dead mouse.

Luke burst into tears. “Without their mom, the baby mice will die!”

“No, they won’t,” Ava said. “We’ll take care of them. Don’t you cry, Luke.”

“We don’t know how to take care of baby mice,” Jason said.

Then Colin had an inspiration. “We’ll take them all to Grandma! She used to have mice at her work, she told me. She’ll know how to take care of the babies, and maybe she can even fix the mommy mouse!”

Jason stared at the corpse. “I don’t think so. It’s pretty dead.”

“Well, let’s bring it anyway.”

Luke said, “We haven’t got a box.”

“That’s okay,” Ava said. “We got clothes.” She pulled off her parka. It was pink, but the mommy mouse was a girl so that was okay.

“Don’t touch the mice!” Jason said. “Pick them up with clothes!”

Carefully, Ava scooped up the dead mouse with her parka.

Colin said, “We got to get the babies.” He started digging dirt away from the hole.

The babies were deeper than Colin thought, but they got them out. There were six, but two were already dead. Jason put the live ones in his parka and Colin put the dead two into his pockets, lifting them with brown leaves. Luke took off his parka and made Ava wear it. The baby mice kept on crying for their mother.

Colin really, really hoped that Grandma would know what to do.

It took Marianne almost a week to find Stubbins. First he was “off-site” at one of his companies. Then she’d “just missed him” at the mess. There was a warm cup of coffee in his office but no Stubbins. Finally she ran him to ground on the bridge of the Venture, where she was not supposed to be but Judy told the duty guard it was urgent that they see Mr. Stubbins stat. The guard knew that Judy was a scientist, and she’d put on her most intimidating look. They went aboard.

So this was the twin of the ship that had taken Noah away to the stars. Marianne was surprised all over again at how small it was. She’d always imagined the Deneb mother ship to be even larger than an aircraft carrier, but the Venture wouldn’t have filled a football field. A quarter of the interior was taken up by the shuttle bay, another quarter by storage. The drive machinery was encased in some sort of field that involved both quantum entanglement and dark energy. There may or may not have been an unknown version of wormholes connected to the star drive. That anybody would ride in this ship was an act of insane courage.

The rest of the Venture was divided into a small bridge at the bow and, behind it, a large living area. This contained partly unfinished seats, sleeping cubicles, kitchen, bathrooms, communications systems, none of which were specified in the plans. The basic machinery was Deneb but the fittings would be Terran. Marianne picked her way among crates, tools, and workmen listening to loud rock as they riveted.

Over the din Judy yelled, “You asked once if I’d go? In a New York minute. But my frustrations aren’t the point today, are they? Good luck, Marianne.” She left, running her hand lovingly along a gleaming curved bulkhead. All the beauty and grace the campsite lacked was embodied here, at least potentially, in the alien ship that humans were trying to make their own.

The door to the bridge stood open. Beyond it, Stubbins loomed large, listening intently to two engineers. If he was surprised to see Marianne, he didn’t show it.

She listened to the rest of the engineers’ report, unable to follow most of it. When they left, Stubbins followed. Marianne said, “A word, please, Jonah.”

“Not now. I gotta—”

“It’s about Carl Tyson and his son Paul.”

Stubbins stopped, looked at her.

Marianne said, “You might want to close the door.”

He did. Marianne told him what Tim had said about Paul and the gunman in Manhattan, making the connections sound more definite than Tim had actually found. She finished with, “I don’t expect you to admit any of this. What I want to know, right now, is why you so badly wanted me here at the Venture site. Why you paid for apartments, bodyguard, the kids’ school, Ryan’s treatment, all of it. Why you brought me here.”

He said, “Your insider’s view as a force shaping public opinion about—”

“Bullshit. Two dozen people could have written those articles, and if we changed even one person’s mind in this polarized political atmosphere, I’ve yet to hear about it. It was Colin you wanted, wasn’t it? Not me. The research on your new drug under hush-hush development in Colorado, the one to help the generation born with hyper-hearing issues—you wanted to run fMRIs and other tests on Colin’s brain, to find out what is different about him that he can handle the auditory bombardment. How did you even find out he could? The testing company I first took him to, right? You were collecting that sort of data.”

Stubbins said nothing, watching her.

“But then you found Ava. She’s better at that than even Colin is, and you can get agreement from her mother for pretty much anything, including things that I might balk at. Just offer to marry Belinda.”

“Marianne,” Stubbins said, and now his voice had gone avuncular, “maybe it’s good that we’re having this conversation. If you are really unhappy here, maybe it’s better if you and the boys go.”

She hadn’t expected that, hadn’t been thinking far enough ahead. Where would they go? A laboratory job might be impossible to find, given her notoriety. Perhaps her old college would take her back. Most universities were, for various reasons, pro-Deneb. Even if she couldn’t get tenure-track again, or at least not right away, maybe she could negotiate a year-to-year contract until something opened up.

“Maybe that is best,” she said to Stubbins. “But I need a few weeks to make arrangements. At least. Can I stay here that long?”

“Of course. Stay as long as you like.” He waved his hand magnanimously, a cheap fake-regal gesture, and she thought how much she disliked him. Then he made one of his chameleon changes of personality. “Marianne—don’t judge me too harshly. If I can bring this drug to market, the one that suppresses the neural firings that respond to hyper- and subsonic sounds, I can help a lot of families. And I want to. As much as I want to launch the Venture.”

Impossible to not believe him. She had never met such a complex person, such a mixture of idealism, ego, and crassness. She hoped to never meet one again. Jonah Stubbins bewildered her.

“Best of luck to you, Marianne,” he said—with genuine feeling, as far as she could tell—and lumbered off the bridge.

She was in the mess, sending e-mails on her laptop, when Judy dropped onto the chair beside her. Judy’s voice was husky and she held, against all rules, a burning cigarette. “Allison is really ill.”

Alarm ran through Marianne; Allison dealt so closely with her pupils. “Not just a stomach virus? Is it a virulent strain of flu? This is flu season. Is anybody else ill?”

“Nobody else, which makes me think it’s not flu. Everybody is supposed to get vaccines immediately. It’ll be on the PA soon.”

“Vaccines for what?”

“They’re not saying.”

“Judy, that’s ridiculous. You can’t vaccinate people without telling them what for. That’s illegal.”

“Oh, they’ll tell us something. But will it be what Allison really has? If it were flu, somebody else would be sick. Especially the kids, since she works with them, and I saw them tearing toward your room just a few minutes ago, healthy as wild pigs. It’s not flu. So what is it?”

Judy’s innate paranoia? Maybe. “How do you know that Allison is that sick? And what are her symptoms?”

“Nurse at the infirmary is a friend of mine. Fever, chills, and nausea to start, now low blood pressure, vascular leakage, kidney problems.”

“Couldn’t that be a lot of different things? And if she were really ill, wouldn’t they move her to a real hospital?”

“Maybe. My friend isn’t nursing Allison, she’s in isolation and the only doctor who’s treating her does everything, including bedpans.”

“Well, for quarantine…” Vivid memories flooded Marianne of her own quarantine aboard the Embassy. But that had been for R. sporii, a truly dangerous microbe. “Or so we thought,” she suddenly heard in Evan’s voice, ghostly across seven years. “But still, a vaccine requires full disclosure.”

“If you say so.” Judy ground the cigarette onto the concrete floor, left it there, and walked off.

Marianne picked up her laptop and went to her room. All four children waited there and Judy was right: They looked healthy in a wild, hectic sort of way. Two parkas lay bunched up on the table. One squeaked.

“Mice!” Jason cried. “Grandma, we got to show you something!”

Six pups of Mus musculus, two of them dead and the other four not looking good. A dead doe with thin and patchy fur lay stiffly in what looked like a convulsive position. No blood or other evidence of predation. She said as calmly as she could, “Did you touch the mice? Any of you?”

“No!” Jason said proudly. “I told everybody to pick them up with their clothes!”

Colin, looking more troubled, said, “Can you make the other babies stay alive?”

“I don’t know, honey. Probably not.” Most diseases did not jump species. But some could: rabies, avian flu, MERS. And rodents could be carriers of human diseases without being affected themselves, although these mice certainly had been. So not hantavirus, not bubonic plague, not a lot of things. Probably just a mouse disease, something else that, if it spread, would again complicate ecological recovery.

“I want you all to go take a good shower, with lots of soap. Wash your hair. Don’t put the same clothes on again. Just in case you might get whatever disease the mice have, okay? Let’s do that now.”

Ava, staring at the mice, said, “I don’t want to die.”

“Nobody’s going to die, honey. I promise.”

Colin, focused on his main concern, said, “But can you make the babies well?”

“I don’t know, Col. We’ll try.”

He stuck out his lower lip. “The other mouse was well. It ran fast.”

“What other mouse?”

“The other one. The striped one.”

There should be no striped mice in this part of Pennsylvania. She said, “You can draw me a picture later. First, a shower.”

Marianne put Ava in her own shower and the three boys, one after the other, in theirs, carefully bagging their clothes in plastic and giving Ava some of Colin’s, which fit her skinny little body well. Who had been looking after Ava since her mother went off-site for plastic surgery? Marianne felt guilty that she hadn’t even asked. Stubbins must have found someone; he always did.

And what of Luke, now that Marianne would be taking her grandchildren away with her?

She pushed that thought aside for now. She didn’t even have a position at the college yet. When the kids were clean and dry, the announcement came over the PA—Lyme disease had stricken a staff member. Everyone would be vaccinated, purely as a precaution.

Allison Blake’s symptoms, as described by Judy, didn’t sound like Lyme disease, which was tick-borne. Marianne examined the mouse pups, dead and alive. None of them carried ticks. And Lyme disease did not kill M. musculus.

Colin brought her the drawing he’d been working on while Ava, Luke, and Jason played something noisy on their Nintendo. Colin had always been an exceptionally good artist for his age. He’d used his colored pencils and worked carefully.

Marianne took the picture and her spine stiffened as if she’d never move again.

“What is it, Grandma? Why do you look like that? Is that a bad mouse? Did it trap those angry people we heard down in the cave under the woods?”

“Marianne, it’s the middle of the night! What’s happened? You look—Come in!”

Harrison stood frowzy and alarmed at the door of his—once their—apartment in the secure enclave near Columbia. She’d insisted that the gate guard phone him, just as she’d insisted that the chopper pilot take her immediately to Ryan’s home because her son had tried to commit suicide. The pilot had of course checked with Stubbins, who’d okayed the trip. Marianne would feel guilty later about using Ryan’s illness like that. The chopper departed and the cab she had waiting at Oakwood Gardens drove at crash-worthy speed south to New York.

“You’re the only one I can trust, Harrison. There’s something going on at the Venture building site and—”

He said sharply, “The kids?”

“Okay. I left them with Judy. This is—”

“Who’s Judy?”

She’d forgotten his methodical, careful way of assessing a situation: dig out all the facts, arrange them in rows, study them. It steadied her. You didn’t win a Nobel Prize with wild assumptions, nor with excesses of either trust or paranoia. She had always admired Harrison’s mind, and now she needed it.

“Judy is a friend, a physicist at the site. I need to tell you all of this, but first let me show you some data points. Dead mice and a picture.”

He looked at both. He said, “That’s Apodemus agrarius, the striped field mouse. It’s not found in the United States.”

“It is now,” she said grimly. Another invasive species. “And it carries Korean hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome. You remember that German scientist did the initial work on HFRS infecting Mus musculus, probably from Apodemus, and then the American team led by Samuel Wolski extended it.” From her bag she drew the six dead, plastic-wrapped pups.

Harrison studied them. “I’d need to do lab work on these, of course. Do you have live specimens?”

“Not anymore. Harrison, there’s a woman at the Venture site ill from what I think may be HFRS. The rest of us have been vaccinated, but we were told it’s for Lyme disease.”

“Why do you think it wasn’t? And that whatever killed these mice is in any way related to your sick woman?”

“I can’t know for sure. But I brought you a vaccine sample—I stole it, actually.” She’d pretended she couldn’t breathe, sending the nurse out the room to summon a doctor, and had pocketed a vial of vaccine.

He frowned and ran a hand through his thinning hair in a gesture she remembered well. “I can do tests, of course, Marianne, but the vaccine for Korean hemorrhagic fever isn’t even available in the United States. They use it extensively in China and Korea, but it isn’t FDA approved.”

“That wouldn’t even slow down Jonah Stubbins.”

“Stubbins?” Harrison grimaced. “No, probably not. But still… the disease is transmitted through inhalation of aerosolized rodent urine or feces. Transmission rates aren’t high with proper pest control.”

“That’s another thing I want you to investigate,” Marianne said. “To find out if the virus has been genetically altered to go airborne.”

“Marianne—why on Earth would anyone—”

“Not on Earth,” she said. “On World. As a weapon, or a threat of weapon. Find out. Please.”

CHAPTER 23

S plus 6.5 years

Everything was bad.

The mice all got dead. Everybody had to get a shot in the arm, which hurt, and Colin felt sick for a whole day after his. Grandma said they had to leave the spaceship camp, her and Colin and Jason, and Colin didn’t want to go. Luke wasn’t going and Ava wasn’t going—they got to live here. But Ava wasn’t here now because she had to fly with Mr. Stubbins someplace for some more of those stupid tests. Two weeks had gone by since Grandma told them about leaving, and Ava had been gone that whole time.

“Everything’s shit,” Colin said, trying out the forbidden word. He only did that because Grandma had left her laptop to go to the bathroom, while Jason and Colin did math on their tablets and Luke struggled to read something to himself in the corner. His lips moved. They were the only ones in the mess hall because it wasn’t time to eat and anyway why weren’t they in their own room where they usually did lessons? Maybe because Grandma looked a lot at her laptop.

“Not everything’s shit,” said Jason, who liked math better than Colin did. Colin liked drawing and reading but not math. “Grandma said Daddy was getting better and pretty soon he can come live with us again.”

Colin said nothing. He liked living here better than he’d liked living with Daddy.

“And Ms. Blake is getting better, too.”

“She isn’t better enough to teach us,” Colin pointed out. “And when she is all better, we’ll be gone and we’ll have a new school and new kids to get used to and that’ll be shit, too.” He thought of Paul Tyson.

“Maybe it will be good,” Jason said, entering an answer on his tablet. “There might be enough kids for a soccer team.”

“I hate soccer,” Colin said, although he’d never played soccer. Right now he hated everything. Everything was shit. And he couldn’t figure out how many apples were left over if you divided seven of them up evenly for Pat and Pam and Cam. Who cared if those stupid girls got any apples anyway?

Jason said, “Why are you so grumpy?”

“I don’t want to move away.”

Jason sighed. “Col—”

“I’m going now.” The idea burst in on him like a firecracker. He could walk out of this room! Grandma could make him leave the camp for good and miss the spaceship launch and everything, but she couldn’t make him sit here and do this math. She had really disappointed him! That’s what she said when he or Jason did something bad, they’d disappointed her, but this time he was the one who was disappointed. No camp, no mice, no Luke or Ava forever and ever. He had a right to be disappointed!

He got up and walked to the door.

“Hey!” Jason said. Luke stared with big eyes.

Colin opened the door and darted through it, real fast, before Grandma could come out of the bathroom. He knew where he was going and he ran as fast as he could. Behind him he heard Jason, still going “Hey! Hey!” and then Luke. Jason was taller and Luke was bigger and all three boys reached the spaceship at the same time.

Jason panted, “What… do you… think you’re doing?”

Colin didn’t answer him. The spaceship door was open, but two workmen inside were doing something to a door and they would just tell him to go away. So he walked—he was too tired now to run—around to the other side of the Venture, where there was no door. There was a guard but he was used to the boys and just went on reading his comic book. Colin slumped to the ground, his back against the side of the ship, which was called the “hull.” It felt warm from sunshine. Then Colin heard it.

Luke did, too. Luke said, “There’s mice in there!”

Colin pressed his ear to the hull. The sounds were clear and high. He rearranged the rows of noises in his head to hear the mouse sounds more clearly. “A lot of mice.”

“They’re mad,” Luke said.

Jason said, “Let’s go in and see them!”

The boys crept back around the ship. The door was still open but the workmen weren’t there. Colin led the way through the airlock, into the big room where some seats were ready and some still in big boxes. To Colin’s surprise, he heard Mr. Stubbins on the bridge. Did that mean Ava was back? Then why wasn’t she at Grandma’s school? Mr. Stubbins said to somebody, “Damn it, there has to be a door on that toilet! Make it fit!”

A workman—Colin could see part of him now, on the bridge—answered. “It won’t fit, sir. It just won’t.”

Luke said, “We shouldn’t be here.”

Jason said, “Luke’s right. Let’s go.”

But Colin didn’t want to go back to math and to Grandma—who was going to be even madder than the mice—and to leaving camp forever. Another firecracker idea burst into his head. “I can’t go! I have to rescue the mice!”

“Rescue?” Jason said.

It was like Brandon and the elephant in the basement! Colin was the hero who would rescue the mice, who were probably mad because they were trapped in their cages. But Colin didn’t have time to explain that because the two workmen, frowning, came back from the bridge. Jason and Luke ran through the airlock and outside. Colin yanked open a door and ducked behind it.

The mice weren’t here. It was a big empty space except for a smaller ship: the shuttle. The walls of the room had cupboards, mostly open and mostly empty. Colin climbed into one and closed the door. He just fit. Perfect—he could stay here until night when everybody left, and then he could go out and rescue the mice.

After a while it got cramped in the cupboard, but Colin stayed in there because that’s what rescuers did. He could hear everything: the mice and the workmen and Mr. Stubbins rumbling to somebody else on the bridge and the ship making its metal-ship sounds and the underground machines and the real ground under that. All of it.

But it was cramped and he wished everyone would go home.

The e-mail arrived while Marianne was in the bathroom. She heard the laptop ping with the specific sound she and Harrison had set up as a signal, and she finished hastily and rushed out to the mess. The boys were gone.

“Jason? Colin? Luke?”

No answer. They’d run off. She was surprised because all three were usually obedient, but Colin and Jason had both been angry with her ever since the announcement that they were leaving the Venture site. She’d deal with them later. This e-mail was the reason she’d been teaching the boys here instead of in the classroom.

Her heart began a slow, arrhythmic bumping in her chest.

Harrison had written using the code they’d worked out, he skeptical that such “cloak-and-dagger histrionics” were necessary, she increasingly sure that they were. Each sentence meant something entirely different than its ostensible content:

My dear Marianne—

Not “dear Marianne” or just “Marianne.” The dead Mus had tested positive for hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome.

I find myself thinking about the time we spent together in the harbor, at Columbia, that day in Central Park…

Harrison’s hybridization analyses of the postmortem material had found either antigens or the viral RNA itself in the mice’s brain, liver and spleen.

… and, especially, that memorable boat ride on the Hudson.

A small groan escaped her. That was the worst. The virus’s genes had altered so that it could infect via a respiratory route. Either that evolution had occurred naturally, or there had been a long, intensive effort to change the genome.

I guess what I’m saying is that I would like to see you again…

Colin’s identification of the striped field mouse had been accurate. Apodemus had been imported to carry the virus here. Or rather, not here—to World.

She had no doubt now that Stubbins had imported and altered the virus, or that World was his target. Apodemus was an incredibly adaptive rodent, and Terrans already knew it was not killed by the spore cloud. Stubbins had stockpiled vaccine in case it was needed for just such an emergency as Colin’s escaped mouse. World would have no vaccines, no natural immunity. Judy’s speculations did not look quite so paranoid now. If Judy was right and World did not know as much genetics as Stubbins’s scientists did, Worlders would be vulnerable to even the threat of the disease. This version of HFRS was the most deadly, with a kill rate of 15 percent—and that was not counting what other microbes the mice might carry as they slipped, silently and pervasively, into whatever World cities looked like. And even if alien microbes killed the mice, the rodents would leave behind droppings, urine, carcasses, all infected with airborne viruses.

Smallpox to the Indians.

But why? What could Stubbins gain? Not revenge. Whatever the Russians might want, Marianne didn’t think that Jonah Stubbins was after vengeance. For that, you had to care about what you’d lost, and Stubbins cared for no one and nothing except profit. So—these mice were bargaining chips, threats, to obtain something from World. Trade, or tribute, or power, or maybe just survival.

There was one more piece to Harrison’s message: Eagerly awaiting your reply, Harrison.

He was notifying the CDC.

Folded up in the cupboard, Colin suddenly had to go to the bathroom. Was there a bathroom on the spaceship? There must be because every place had a bathroom, even parks, although Grandma wouldn’t let Colin use park bathrooms by himself. Colin wished he were in a park now. He crossed his legs.

There were less people in the ship now. Colin could hear every one of them, if he looked at the right rows of sounds. Closest was Mr. Stubbins, still on the bridge, rumbling at two men and Grandma’s friend Dr. Taunton. Colin was supposed to call her Aunt Judy, she said so, but he never did because she wasn’t his aunt. Aunt Elizabeth was his only aunt, and he hardly ever saw her because she lived far away in Texas, where she played with guns. She didn’t like children anyway.

What if Grandma took Colin and Jason to live with Aunt Elizabeth? Well, he wouldn’t go, he just wouldn’t! So there!

Crossing his legs wasn’t helping.

Marianne was still staring at Harrison’s message when Jason and Luke burst into the mess hall, panting, their faces gleaming with sweat. “We lost Colin!”

Marianne grabbed Jason’s arm. “What do you mean, you lost him? Is he hurt? What happened?”

“He ain’t hurt, ma’am,” Luke said, and belatedly Marianne saw that Jason was more excited than alarmed. Some sort of boyish adventure, then. But Colin was barely six.

She forced herself to calm. “Tell me what happened.”

“We went to see the spaceship,” Jason said. He propped himself with one arm against a table and pretended to pick a speck of dirt off his sleeve. Marianne recognized the attempt at casualness to cover transgression; she’d seen it in Ryan, just this same pose, all his life.

Jason continued. “There were people coming out of the bridge so we ran but Colin didn’t come. Maybe he wanted to find the mice.”

“Mice? What mice?”

Luke said in his slow, labored speech, “Mice on the ship. Lots.”

Stubbins was stocking his weapons. Oh dear God. How close was liftoff? Who knew? “Where did Colin go?”

“We don’t know,” Jason said. “Maybe he’s still on the ship? Or he ran away to hide? He’s mad at you, Grandma, ’cause he doesn’t want to leave camp.” After a moment he added bravely, looking directly at her, “I don’t want to, either.”

“I know. We’ll talk about it more. But right now I have to go find Colin. You two stay right here, do you hear me? I mean it. If I find out that you left the mess hall again…”

“Yes’m,” Luke said. He hung his head. Jason did not, but he sat on a bench and halfheartedly picked up his tablet, still displaying math problems.

Marianne moved at a fast walk to the Venture. She was not seriously worried about Colin, who was only acting out his displeasure at leaving. But what Stubbins planned was bioterrorism. Harrison would, of course, think first of the CDC; he focused on pathogens. But if Marianne was right and Stubbins actually intended to menace World, if he was bringing infected mice to threaten or retaliate—

She didn’t know how men like Stubbins thought. She never had. But others did know, the military and the FBI, and that’s where the CDC would report. The president. The UN. What was left of NASA. Something would be done. It was out of Marianne’s hands, and she knew that what she felt was, in part, a cowardly relief.

The door of the Venture stood open. Inside, two workmen were installing a door on a bathroom. Marianne was surprised at how complete the interior now looked. Seats bolted to the deck, tables, a wall screen that said “Sony,” a giant coffeemaker on one wall. The interior was being customized for Terrans. Doors led to the bridge, the shuttle bay, the aft storage area. Were the mice back there?

“Well, hold the fucking door steady!” one of the workmen said to the other.

“I told you, it won’t fit! No matter what the old man says!”

“Well, we need another one, then. We’re done here for today.”

Marianne went through to the bridge. Stubbins was there, along with Judy and the chief engineer, Eric Wilshire. Behind Stubbins stood his bodyguard, whom Marianne had never heard called anything but “Stone.” He was huge, muscular, and blank-faced. Not usually around when Stubbins was at the ship, Stone’s presence suggested that Stubbins had just returned from another of his off-site trips.

Judy carried an unlit cigarette and looked annoyed. “Eric, I’ve explained and explained. The plans are mostly pictorial and mathematical, so we’re guessing at all the effects, and even though the shielding seems minimal there’s evidence that the repulsion factor doesn’t exceed the—Hey, Marianne.”

“Hi. Jonah, is Colin here?”

“Colin? ’Course not. Why would he be here?”

Stubbins gazed at her, and Marianne felt a shiver in her brain, as if he could see directly into it. See her thoughts, know what she now knew. He was preternaturally insightful, as aggressors often were. Was her body language giving away her revulsion, her fear, her fury at what he planned to do? Or was she responding to one of his infernal pheromonal scents? No, that was fanciful; she was under too much stress; her suppositions were ridiculous.

No, they weren’t. Stubbins knew she’d discovered something. He knew.

She said, “Colin ran away. I know he’s fascinated with the ship so I thought maybe—”

Judy, oblivious but helpful, said, “He isn’t here, Marianne. We’re just winding down for the day.”

“Okay, I’ll just—”

Then everything began at once.

Aaarrrrr! Aaarrrr! Aaarrrr! Blat blat blat!

Sirens sounded, just like a fire engine but a lot louder. Colin had heard those sirens once before, when the bad guys fired missiles at the other spaceship and wrecked it. The Venture was getting attacked!

He burst out of the storage cupboard and fell, his legs wouldn’t work right, they were all cramped up. A moment later he was up. He ran through the door from the shuttle bay just before it swung shut and made a locking sound.

The big door to the airlock swung shut and locked, too, but not the bathroom door because there still wasn’t one. Colin bolted for the toilet and made it just before it would have been too late. Only the toilet didn’t have any water in it or pipes; it wasn’t hooked up yet. He didn’t care.

Grandma’s voice behind him—what was Grandma doing here? Nothing made sense! “Colin, what are you… oh my God!”

Colin finished peeing and turned around. The wall screen in the big room was filled with a man’s face. He looked familiar, like somebody Colin had seen around camp. He also looked scared.

“Incoming, incoming,” the man said. “Impact in ninety seconds…. Jonah, the Venture is the target! Eighty-five seconds…”

Bad words were shouted from the bridge, a very lot of very bad words. Mr. Stubbins. Colin didn’t know what to do. Then Mr. Stubbins said, “I’m lifting,” and Dr. Taunton yelled, “No!” and Grandma grabbed Colin and he screamed, too, because all the grown-ups were so scared.

The spaceship made different, new noises, coming to life.

Dear God, the Venture was taking off.

Marianne grabbed Colin, who stood with his jeans around his ankles, pissing into a pipeless toilet. Stubbins cursed from the bridge, loud raspy noises as if the very words choked his throat. Judy yelled something—

Judy. What had Judy said, months ago? “A very real fact—no one knows what will happen the day we finish the ship and press the button to start her.”

But nothing seemed to be happening, not even motion. No press of gees on Marianne’s body, no tilt to the floor, nothing to say the ship was lifting except the clanging shut of the airlock and shuttle bay doors and the two images on the wall screen, now split between the twisted face of the ground officer and the land falling rapidly, silently away beneath them.

“My pants!” Colin cried. “Let me go!”

“Twenty, nineteen, eighteen—” said the ground officer.

An aerial view of the building site, then the no-man’s land around it, then the perimeter fence and guard towers.

“Grandma, my pants!”

“Thirteen, twelve, eleven—”

Hills and farmlands coming into view. Frightened cows raced away from the thing in the sky.

Marianne released Colin, who yanked up his jeans. On the bridge Stubbins still shrieked and Judy matched him in volume. The door to the storage bay flung open and a man stumbled out, his face ashen. “Jonah—”

“Seven, six, five—”

Marianne threw Colin into one of the seats—as if that would help anything! The ashen-faced man, she knew him, from somewhere…. “No one knows what will happen…” Incoming incoming….

“Three, two—”

Far below them, something streaked white across the landscape, and then the place where the Venture had been exploded into light and flame, almost immediately obscured by thick smoke. Marianne forced her eyes to stay open, to watch… no mushroom cloud. The weapon had not been nuclear. But how much of the site had been taken out? Jason and Luke—

She dashed to the bridge. The ship rose steadily, light as a soap bubble. Stubbins stood in the middle of the bridge, meaty hands gripping the back of the captain’s chair, with Judy and Eric Wilshire in the two side chairs facing consoles, studying data displays just as if they knew what they were doing. Stubbins said, “How bad?”

The ground officer’s face, pupils dilated as if on drugs, said, “A direct hit, probably from a high-explosive Scud. Hard to see through the smoke but it seems… two buildings severely damaged. Casualties unknown. Havers, come in, Havers… Johnson… Olvera…”

But Wilshire, even paler than the man in the main cabin, said desperately, “Mr. Stubbins! What—”

“Stop the ship!” Stubbins roared. And then: “Do you know how to stop the ship?”

“No one knows what will happen—”

The ship stopped.

Marianne clutched at something, anything, to keep herself upright. Her hand found the back of Judy’s chair. There was no lurch beneath her feet, no sound of grinding engines. The ship simply stopped; again her dazed mind thought of a soap bubble, gently hovering. A soap bubble with perfect Terran gravity inside it…. My God, what forces must be contained here! How had human engineers built this?

Below, in panoramic sweep and brilliant Technicolor, lay Pennsylvania as it might be seen from a jet liner thirty thousand feet up. Life-support machinery must have switched on somewhere; there was warmth and oxygen and light.

Stubbins began to laugh.

The sound was shocking, unreal—more unreal even than the alien ship around them. “We did it!” he cried. “We fucking did it!”

Marianne felt something clutch her legs. Colin. She found her voice, although it didn’t sound like hers. “Jonah—the children? On the ground?”

Stubbins didn’t hear her. She had seen faces like that in medieval paintings, on stained-glass windows. His broad features and small eyes shone, transfigured with unholy joy.

“Jonah! The children!”

She might as well have spoken to the bulkhead. But Judy, who’d been talking in low, rapid tones to unseen people on the ground, said, “The kids were nowhere near the impact, Marianne. Jonah, NASA codes coming in.”

Stubbins took her seat. Judy grabbed Marianne and dragged her off the bridge, Colin still clinging to her. “You don’t belong here. Classified. They don’t need me in there. Kid, you all right?”

Colin nodded. The man who’d burst out of the storage bay stood uncertainly beside a crate. Judy said, “Who the fuck are you?”

“I know who he is,” Marianne said because, all at once, she did. “Wolski. Samuel Wolski, the geneticist. You did that work on HFRS infecting Mus!”

Judy started back toward the bridge but stopped as if shot when Marianne said, “The infected mice. They’re aboard, aren’t they? To release on World.”

Wolski, cowering, moved behind the crate, as if Marianne might attack him. Every organ in her body turned to mush. She’d been right, then—Stubbins had weaponized mice and was prepared to deliberately cause a plague on World if he thought it might help him get what he wanted. And now the Venture had lifted and was on its way to… oh, God, was the ship steerable? Or was its alien technology preset on one route, a sort of interstellar trolley on fixed and unalterable tracks?

Judy exploded, “Infected mice? Here?”

“Judy,” Marianne managed to get out, “is the Venture—”

But Judy had turned away. She had heard, as Marianne had not, the shouting on the bridge, even through the thick metal door. Judy flung it open and bolted back to the bridge.

Marianne hesitated, then grabbed Colin and dragged him with her. She wouldn’t leave him with Wolski. And if the Venture was about to self-destruct, or vanish into some other dimension, or plummet to Earth, she wanted to be holding Colin when it happened.

The Venture did none of these things. The bridge had the focused air of a high-stakes poker game, the shouting suddenly over. Stubbins sat in the captain’s chair, facing a screen showing a room full of people in uniform. Wilshire occupied the second chair, Judy the third.

“No,” Stubbins said, quietly. Yet the word had the force of an avalanche. He touched something and the room full of uniformed men and women, suddenly moving very fast and with faces rigid with anger, all disappeared. Stubbins’s ground officer reappeared.

“Confirmed, Jonah. I’ll put it on tracking.”

The central screen in front of the captain’s chair split into two, with the officer on one side and a graphic on the other. An arc of the Earth, looking like a blue marble—had the Venture resumed flight? Marianne had felt nothing. Beside the arc were two dots, one blue and one green, moving toward each other.

Judy made a low sound that Marianne had never heard anyone make.

Marianne’s mind raced. Human communications systems on the Venture—and what else? As long as the drive machinery and life support and other technical aspects of the Deneb plans weren’t altered, anything could be added to the ship. Military tracking systems? Military weapons? Yes, of course. If homegrown terrorist groups could obtain Russian Scuds, what couldn’t Jonah Stubbins obtain on the international black market?

Or was it the black market? Had the US Army… No. That room full of angry soldiers had not approved of whatever Stubbins was up to now.

“Judy,” Marianne said, because it was clear that no one else would answer her, “what are those blue and green dots?”

Judy didn’t reply. She was rapidly typing on a keyboard and examining data brought up on her screen. But Stubbins heard Marianne and he said, still in that deadly voice, “Get off the bridge. Now.”

Marianne stayed where she was. But she said to Colin, “Go back to your seat and stay there. Do you hear me?”

At her tone, he stuck out his lip, but he went. No time now to worry about Wolski.

“You, too,” Stubbins said, without turning around. Marianne didn’t move. Judy suddenly sank into her chair and her head snapped back as if she’d taken a blow, but a moment later she was back keying in commands.

“Stone!” Stubbins bellowed.

The bodyguard moved toward Marianne. Effortlessly, as if she were Colin, he picked her up and carried her, flailing pointlessly, to the door. He shoved her through and slammed the door to the bridge. A second later she heard the lock click.

Colin cringed in his seat, looking very small. Marianne, scarcely knowing what she was doing, went to him and he crawled onto her lap. Wolski had disappeared. Colin began to talk, but she didn’t hear him.

She had caught a snatch of Wilshire’s conversation with the tracking station on the ground. She knew what the two moving dots on the screen, so small beside Earth, were. One was the Venture. The other was the Russian ship Mest’.

The Revenge.

Colin was scared. Nobody was acting right. It should have been thrilling to be up on the ship out in space—especially since Jason and Luke and Ava didn’t get to go, only him—but it wasn’t. Grandma was holding him too tight and that big man who was always with Mr. Stubbins had locked them out of the bridge and Colin had peed in a toilet with no pipes so that he couldn’t even flush his pee away. It was just sitting in there for anybody to see because there was no door on the bathroom.

And the big wall screen had nothing on it to look at.

But at least that changed. Somebody on the bridge must have done something because all at once a picture of Earth—Colin was proud that he knew what it was—came onto the screen, with two dots moving near it.

“Grandma, is that a video game? Can I play? Where’s the controller?”

Grandma didn’t answer. A second later sound got added to the picture, but it was just Aunt Judy and Mr. Stubbins and that other guy on the bridge. Aunt Judy whispered, “Marianne, one-way comm,” and then there was only the other two grown-ups, saying things Colin didn’t understand.

But maybe Grandma did, because she got even weirder. She went all stiff, like the mice that had died, and for a horrible minute Colin was afraid that Grandma was dying, too. But she wasn’t, so he said again, “Where’s the controller? Can I—”

“Be quiet,” she said, so mean that Colin was shocked. Grandma was never mean to him! Nothing was right!

He jumped off her lap. She said to him, “Sit down and don’t say anything.” It was her obey-me-or-else voice, so he did. But he picked a seat behind her so that when she wasn’t looking he could leave the room and go hide again. That would show her!

Tears prickled his eyes. He hated everything.

After a moment he got up and moved—carefully, soundlessly—toward the storage bay. He could hear the mice someplace in there. Right now, mice were nicer than Grandma. Quietly, Colin opened the door, slipped through, and closed it behind him.

Judy had routed audio-visuals to the screen in the main cabin. Marianne listened, and looked, and found she could barely breathe.

The Mest’ had lifted because the Venture did. To the Russians, it must look as if the Venture was going to beat them to World. Or were they afraid of some other kind of attack that these ships were capable of but ordinary weapons were not?

She knew nothing about weapons, ordinary or alien. But Noah and Ambassador Smith had both told her that the Denebs were peaceful, did not engage in warfare. Had Noah been deceived and Smith lying? Or had Stubbins’s engineers, as well as those on the Mest’, discovered ways to use the drive machinery as a weapon? Dark energy, Judy had told her. Quantum entanglement.

No. There was no reason for this much paranoia. The Venture had lifted because of the Scud, and the Mest’ lifted because the Venture had. In a moment the Venture would set back down in Pennsylvania, and the Mest’ would set back down at Vostochny because even if vengeance was the Russians’ motive for building their ship, they weren’t any more ready for an interstellar voyage than Stubbins was. The UN would be working on this mess right now. Vihaan Desai was no longer Secretary-General, but the newly chosen Lucas Rasmussen of Denmark was a man of peace. In just a moment the Venture would return to Earth… dear Lord please let Wilshire know how to actually control this thing….

Stubbins’s voice said over the open channel, “Eric, get close enough to fire.”

“Yes, sir,” Eric said.

Marianne’s throat closed so suddenly she couldn’t breathe. Fire? Fire what? Why?

“How long?” Stubbins said.

“Assuming they don’t return to Vostochny—”

“They won’t,” Stubbins said grimly. “Not until we do. They don’t want us warning the Denebs what’s coming. Those Russky sons of bitches aren’t going to destroy my trade partners, much less my ship. We’ll get them first. Maneuver into firing range.”

“We don’t know the range of anything they might—”

“Do it!”

“Yes, sir.”

Breath whooshed back into Marianne’s lungs. Why didn’t Judy object?

Then she knew. Judy had opened the channel so Marianne could hear all this. She had not objected because she did not want to be thrown off the bridge and have it locked behind her. Judy’s paranoia had paid off—she suspected this might be Stubbins’s course of action. And now she and Marianne would have to stop it.

Three men on the bridge, two of them big, Stone a trained fighter. Wolski somewhere aft. The chances of she and Judy—middle-aged, unathletic, female—overpowering the men was nil. What did Judy expect her to do? Judy was the one on the bridge! But over and over Judy had told her “I’m a physicist, not an engineer.” Marianne had no idea of how well Judy understood the human equipment Stubbins had installed on the ship, or what Judy could or could not do with the Venture. And Marianne had far less understanding of the ship than Judy did. So what the fuck could Marianne do?

She could use her brains. It was all she’d ever had.

And… Where was Colin?

Marianne pressed her hands hard against the sides of her face. Then she tried the door to the storage bay. Inside the vast space were pallets of boxes and crates; the liftoff had been so smooth that they had not shifted a centimeter. Marianne said softly, “Colin?”

No answer.

Neatly stowed against the wall on hooks and in straps were tools for opening wooden crates. Marianne freed a crowbar, then tried the door at the far end of the area. It opened.

Exactly what she had expected: a small genetics lab. The familiar equipment—autoclave, sequencer, thermal cycler—looked jolting in this unfamiliar setting. But it was she who was the jolt, who was unfamiliar even to herself. The thudding of her heart melded with squeaks and rustles from the mouse cages lining one wall.

Wolski, bent over a bench, turned. “You! What are you doing—”

“Lie down on the floor,” Marianne said. “Right there. Or I’ll hit you with this.”

Wolski didn’t move. His eyes slid sideways, looking for a weapon of his own. He stood maybe five foot eight, not muscular—could she overpower him if she had to? A close call.

“I said lie down!”

Her tone, so effective with undergraduates and grandchildren, made no impression on Wolski. He started toward her. At the look in his eyes, she struck him on the shoulder with the crowbar.

He cried out and went down, grabbing at her legs. One of his arms got around her knees and she felt herself wobble. Fury filled her. This man—this son of a bitch travesty of a scientist who would set a plague free on strangers, on Noah, for potential profit—this insect would not get the best of her. Even as she was collapsing on top of Wolski, she swung the crowbar at his head.

A sickening crack.

He slumped to the floor and she fell on top of him.

Marianne scrambled away, still clutching the crowbar. Blood streamed from Wolski’s head. But head wounds always bled a lot, that didn’t mean he was that badly injured, didn’t mean he was dead….

She crept back toward him, took his limp wrist in her hand. He was dead.

She, who opposed the death penalty even for serial murderers, had just killed a man.

Weirdly, in numb shock, a line from an old novel came to her: “I won’t think about that today. I’ll think about that tomorrow.” Who? What book?

Then she pushed Margaret Mitchell’s potboiler out of her mind and staggered to her feet. This was an animal lab, which meant mice were sacrificed for autopsy, for tissue extraction, for DNA sequencing. What she needed would be here, somewhere.

She began opening cupboards and drawers. None were locked. Wolski had not anticipated anyone in here who might be a threat.

Colin heard Grandma call him, but he didn’t answer. He had wedged himself between two big mountains of boxes in the storage place, and he was still mad at Grandma. Let her look for him!

But she didn’t. He heard her open the door to the room where the mice were, then close it. The spaceship was so strange—Colin could hear every sound it made, but never in his whole entire life had he not also heard noises from the ground and the plants and the clouds. There wasn’t any ground or plants or clouds. He didn’t even have to put the sounds he heard in rows. The sounds in here—

The sounds got ugly.

Low talking, then louder talking (although he couldn’t make out any words), and then a scream! A crack! Something heavy fell to a floor.

Colin whimpered and shrunk back into his hiding place. But—Grandma had gone in there! What if that mouse man had hurt Grandma? Colin would have to rescue her, just like Brandon rescued the baby elephant in the basement. It was his job.

Still, he wished Jason and Luke and Ava were here to help.

In another minute he would go.

Somebody was slamming doors around in the mouse room. Then, a really loud smash.

In just one more minute he would go, as soon as he remembered just what it was that Brandon had done to make a rescue.

There it was. In the last cupboard she opened, the only one locked. She smashed the lock with the crowbar, smearing Wolski’s blood onto the metal door.

A part of her mind noted that she had become somebody else, somebody who could do these things without flinching. Adrenaline. Cortisone. Amygdala activation.

Necessity.

She had expected the ketamine and other anesthetics, although not in such large quantities. What she had not expected was the large, zippered leather case. But it made sense. Stubbins had not known, because nobody knew, what fauna might exist on World. And Stubbins was a man who believed in thorough preparation.

SURE-PRO VETERINARY TRANQUILIZER SYSTEMS said the lettering on the leather case. Inside were two pistols, syringe darts in graduated sizes, CO₂ cylinders, and a puff sheet with maximum hype and minimum directions.

And in much smaller letters:

Strangled laughter rose in Marianne; she recognized it as hysteria. A second sheet of paper included a table of suggested doses for various tranquilizing agents on different animals. Hands willed into steadiness, she followed the directions to load a CO₂ cylinder, good for six shots, and a dart with the ketamine dosage for a black bear. She practiced ejecting and loading darts, then put four more in her pocket.

How long did she have? How long did it take for a blue dot launched in Russia to get within firing range of a green dot launched in Pennsylvania? When both “pilots” had to learn how to steer their ships?

Nonetheless, she took the time to practice-fire a dart. She was startled by the force with which the syringe left the pipe and buried itself in Wolski’s dead arm.

Bile rose in her throat.

No time, no time.

She reloaded and ran from the lab through the storage bay. Carefully she cracked the door to the main cabin and peered out. Empty.

On the wall screen, the blue and green dots closed in on each other.

Grandma walked past real fast, without seeing Colin peeking out from behind the pile of boxes. All the air went out of him. Grandma was okay! He didn’t have to rescue her, and she was okay!

He waited to see what would happen next. But all that happened was Grandma went out of the storage place back to the big cabin, holding something that Colin couldn’t see very well.

When everything was quiet again, Colin crept out from behind the boxes. Behind the other door, mice squeaked and moved. He wished he knew what they were saying to each other. Something had happened in the mouse room, and curiosity took him. He tiptoed to the door and opened it.

A weird smell, not mousy. He inched into the room.

A man lay on the floor. Blood ran out of his head in little rivers. So much blood! It was the same man Colin had seen before in the big cabin. Somebody had killed him. It must have been Grandma, because nobody else had been in here.

If Grandma had killed the man, then he must be very bad. Maybe he was going to hurt the mice.

Colin crept closer. He’d never seen a dead person before. But it wasn’t really gross because this had been a bad man. Colin squatted on his heels, looking carefully, so he could tell Jason and Luke exactly what a dead bad person looked like. He had a thing sticking up out of him; it looked like the little blue things that popped up on a turkey when it was all roasted and ready to come out of the oven. Did everybody have those things in them, to pop up when they died? Maybe Jason would know.

But what had the man been going to do to the mice that made Grandma kill him? It must have been really bad. Colin left the corpse and went over to the mouse cages. The mice weren’t Mus, they were like the other one that Jason and Colin and Luke and Ava had seen in the woods: grayish-brownish-reddish with long black stripes down their back. Their cute little ears twitched.

What if the bad man had other bad people to help him hurt the mice? Pretty soon, probably, the Venture would go back to Earth. More of Mr. Stubbins’s people would come aboard. Some of them might also be mouse-hurters. And there weren’t enough mice left on Earth—everybody said so!

Colin stood on one foot, chewed on his bottom lip, and thought hard. He hadn’t had to rescue Grandma. But he needed to recue something. Mice shouldn’t be hurt just because they were little. And probably they didn’t like the smell of the bad man’s blood any more than Colin did.

One by one, Colin opened the mouse cages. Some mice stayed inside but some, especially those in the cages closest to the floor, scampered right out. Then, because they were so cute, Colin scooped up two mice and put them in his pocket. They just fit.

He opened the door and made it stay open with a stool he dragged across the floor. A few mice ran out the lab door, toward the smells of food farther into the ship.

Softly Marianne tried the bridge door: locked from the inside. She would have to get Judy to open it. But how? Over the wall screen Marianne could hear what was said on the bridge, but Judy had told her that was one-way communication. And of course, Judy had no idea what Marianne was going to do. Judy just hoped Marianne would do something.

Beyond the door, Stubbins said, “Time until we’re in range?”

Wilshire said, “Another half hour, if everybody holds speed and direction.”

“Judy—any indication that this boat is gonna jump into hyperspace or anything like that?”

“I told you, Jonah, we have no fucking idea. I’m still trying to figure out what the drive is already doing, let alone what it will do.”

“Well, keep trying,” Stubbins said, and Marianne heard the dangerous edge in his voice. “Eric, NASA still jabbering at us?”

“Yeah, but we can arrange it so we have credible deniability.”

Stubbins grunted. Marianne thought: He’s actually going to do it.

This man was going to shoot down a Russian spaceship, despite what had to be a barrage of data coming at him from NASA, from the military, from the White House, from the UN. Maybe even from the Russian ship itself. How did Stubbins think he would get away with this? Would “credible deniability” be enough? Or was his massive narcissism so out of control that he thought nothing on Earth could stop him?

Nothing was.

Or maybe he planned on not going back to Earth afterward. If Wilshire and Judy could fly the Venture from here to World, there would be no human rivals to challenge Stubbins’s trade plans. Stubbins would arrive with only a fraction of the specialists he’d planned, but maybe he thought he could still negotiate—or wrest through terrorism—whatever he was after. The energy shield that had protected the Embassy so completely? With that, he might well be nearly invincible.

Judy said, “Jonah—I need the bathroom. Now. I really cannot wait.”

“Stay where you are!”

“All right,” she said, “but in about twenty seconds this bridge is going to stink of diarrhea and you’re going to choke on the stench. I’ll be gone maybe a minute. Nothing is going to happen in the next minute.”

Wilshire said, “Christ, Judy, we don’t even have a working bathroom.”

“There is,” she said with great and patently fraudulent patience, “a commode. Better than a pile on the bridge deck. A very loose and runny pile.”

“Oh, go!” Stubbins said. “Women!”

Marianne moved quickly from the line of sight from the bridge. She raised her loaded dart gun. If Stone accompanied Judy…

He didn’t. Judy slipped out alone and closed the bridge door behind her.

“I’m here,” Marianne said, gun raised. A sudden panic took her. What if she was wrong, if Judy hadn’t opened that one-way communications channel in order to gain Marianne’s help, if Judy was actually aiding Stubbins….

“Oh, thank God—what is that?” Judy said.

“Tranq gun.”

“You couldn’t get real firearms?”

“No!”

“Okay,” Judy said. “What’s in the gun? How long does it take to work?”

“Ketamine. About two minutes.”

“Two minutes? That’s your plan? Those fuckers can pull out a dart in two minutes!”

“Plan? You think I’ve had time to put together a plan? Judy!”

“Okay, sorry.” She wrinkled her face into a fantastic topography of determination and fear. “We can make it work. Give me the gun. I’ll bet you’ve never fired a pistol in your life.”

True. Marianne said, “If you can hit the neck, that’s best. If—”

“No, wait,” Judy said. She darted to the bathroom and picked up a heavy wrench left by the workmen. “I’m going in first, and you fire. I’m going to hit Stone in the knees, break his kneecaps if I can. Hold the door open a tiny bit until you hear that, then rush in and fire at him first, then at Stubbins. Keep firing—do you have to reload?”

“Yes.”

Judy groaned. “Well, Stone first, then Stubbins. Eric’s a wuss. We have surprise on our side. Let’s go.”

“Judy—if we take them out—then what? The Mest’—”

“One problem at a time. Ready?”

Marianne nodded, lying. She would never be ready for this. A sense of unreality fogged her mind: I’m a geneticist, not Delta Force. Then she crowded close behind Judy to go in.

The rest of the mice wouldn’t leave their cages. Probably they were scared. Colin was. The smell of the dead bad man was making his stomach all funny, so he left the lab and walked carefully through the storage place. The two mice stirred in his pocket but they couldn’t get out.

“I’ll keep you safe,” Colin whispered to them. “We’ll find Grandma.”

The mice made mouse noises, but that didn’t help.

He opened the door to the main cabin. Grandma was by the door to the bridge, her back to him, but before Colin could say anything, she rushed through and the bridge door closed behind her.

The door was left open only the smallest bit, but Stone saw it. “Shut the door,” he said to Judy. Marianne heard them not through the door but through the open channel of the wall screen.

Judy said, “God, that hurt. My ass—hemorrhoids—”

“I said—Arrhhhh!”

Marianne flung open the door. Judy had succeeded in whacking Stone in the knees, and he’d fallen back against the bulkhead. Marianne fired. The dart hit him in the neck. His face twisted into an expression she’d never seen on a human face. He roared, yanked out the dart, and threw himself toward her. Judy whacked him on the back of the head with the wrench and he went down.

But now Stubbins was on Marianne, wrenching the dart gun from her hand. He shouted something she couldn’t hear, something was wrong with her hearing, all sound blurred into a single noisy buzz. Jonah had the gun in one hand and his other came up and backhanded her across the face.

Words emerged in her head from the general buzz: If that had been his fist, I’d be gone. But it hadn’t been his fist and although the pain was incredible, But not as bad as childbirth—what a time to think of labor now—she rolled away. Judy tried to hit Stubbins with the wrench but he batted her away. She fell to the floor and threw it at him. It hit him in the face and his bellow filled the bridge like a gale.

He picked up the wrench and advanced on Judy.

Marianne had not the slightest doubt that he would beat her to death. Stubbins had dropped the tranq gun. Marianne crawled over to it and began reloading. But there was no time, no time—

Wilshire, who’d sat frozen in his chair, came to life now that the odds were so heavily in Stubbins’s favor. He jumped up and pinned Judy to hold her against the bulkhead just to the left of the door, so that Stubbins could better attack her.

“Stop!” a little voice cried. Colin stood in the doorway. “Don’t hurt Aunt Judy!”

Stubbins turned his head briefly, saw Colin, and turned back to Judy. He raised the wrench high above his head.

Something hit him in the face, then another something.

Mice. Colin had thrown two mice at Stubbins. Where had Colin gotten… oh God….

The soft squeaking projectiles distracted Stubbins just long enough for Marianne to stagger up and fire. The dart lodged itself in Stubbins’s neck. He groped to pull it out.

If Wilshire had still been holding Judy, Stubbins’s momentary pause wouldn’t have made any difference. But Wilshire shrieked, “Those mice are infected!” and let go of Judy. The mice, dazed, ran around on the floor. Wilshire pushed past Colin and ran off the bridge, slamming the door behind him. Judy rolled away from Stubbins.

Marianne loaded again and fired.

Stubbins pulled out the second dart and started toward Marianne. Judy leaped onto his back. She didn’t have the wrench, but she reached around his head and gouged at his eyes. He roared and reached behind him to throw her off. She didn’t let go, wildly jabbing at his eyes, and they spun in a crazy tarantella around the bridge. While they struggled, Marianne reloaded and fired her last dart. It hit Stubbins in the shoulder, easily penetrating his shirt. Judy shifted from her unsuccessful attempt to reach his eyes and instead grabbed his arms, trying to keep him from pulling out the dart. Marianne rushed over and hit Stubbins with the empty tranq pistol.

He struck out with his fist, connecting with Marianne’s left shoulder. She gasped with pain but kept hold of the pistol in her right hand, striking him with it until with a huge final roar he grabbed her arm, flung her across the room, and threw Judy off his back. He pulled out the dart.

Colin was trying to catch his mice. Before Marianne could even yell, “No, Colin—don’t touch them!” Stubbins had the boy in his arms.

There was sudden quiet on the bridge.

“Sit in that corner,” Stubbins said, “both of you, or I’ll kill him.”

Marianne cried to Judy, “Do it!”

Judy crept to the corner. Marianne followed her. Colin whimpered but didn’t cry. Marianne focused on Stubbins. His last words had slurred a little. How much of the ketamine had gotten into his bloodstream?

Individual response to tranquilizing agents may vary widely.

“You… you…,” Stubbins said.

Keep him talking. “Jonah, don’t hurt Colin. We’ll do whatever you say, go wherever you want, are you taking the Venture to World, do you know how long the voyage—” She had no idea what she was babbling, she just wanted him to respond, to do anything except hurt Colin—

“Let me go,” Colin said clearly.

Stubbins’s eyes rolled in his head. His big body slumped. Just before he fell over, Colin slipped from his arms and landed upright on the deck, as neatly as if climbing out of bed in the home he didn’t have.

With Stubbins and Stone both down, pain rushed back into Marianne. For a moment blackness took her, but she fought it off. There was no time now for shock.

“Colin, are… you… okay?”

“Yes,” he said. “Are you hurt, Grandma?”

“No,” she lied. “Judy?”

“I think my arm’s broken.”

“I’ll get first aid and—”

“No!” Judy said. “Lock the bridge door.”

“I’ll do it!” Colin said. “I know how!”

Yes, of course—Wilshire was still somewhere in the ship. Marianne did a quick body check on herself. Bruised and hurting but nothing seemed broken. She said, “I have to go out there, Judy. We need rope to tie them up. I don’t know how long Stubbins will be out.”

“Don’t tie up Stone,” Judy said grimly. “He’s dead.”

That made two men they’d murdered. Marianne pushed away the thought and turned to Colin. “You sit up on that big chair, you hear me? Don’t touch anything, including the mice!” The two mice still ran frantically around the bridge, which lacked crevices to hide in. One settled for cowering under what had been Wilshire’s chair. Marianne, Judy, and Colin had all been vaccinated, the supposed “Lyme disease” vaccine—but what if the mice carried something else besides Korean hemorrhagic fever? Did Wilshire know; was that why he was so afraid?

Everything on Marianne hurt. But she picked up the wrench and cautiously opened the door. Both mice ran out. Wilshire was not in the main cabin. Marianne tore open random lockers: no first-aid kit or rope but she did find duct tape.

When she returned, locking the door behind her, Judy had dragged herself into the chair she’d occupied before—the communications chair?—her arm hanging limply by her side, her face twisted with pain. “Can you tie up Stubbins?”

“Yes.” She taped his hands together. As she started on his ankles, Stubbins twitched. Before she’d finished, his eyes opened.

They stared at each other.

Stubbins tried to buck his huge body toward her, but it was a feeble motion. Some ketamine still remained in his system. Then he started to curse, language so foul that Colin’s eyes opened wide. Marianne ripped off her shoe and then a sock and stuffed the sock into his mouth.

Judy laughed, the sound shaky but shocking. She did something else to the controls in front of her and all at once the cabin was filled with Russian voices.

“I have a channel open to the Russian ship,” Judy said unnecessarily. “Can you speak Russian?”

Marianne had only the phrases she’d learned to address a cleaning lady she and Kyle had once had: Please to clean stove today and Need more soap? She understood nothing of the sentences swirling around her. “No!” she said to Judy.

“Well, one of us better try. Look.”

Marianne glanced for the first time at the blue and green dots on the wall screen. They had moved much closer to each other.

Judy said, “I don’t think they can see us. Go.”

“Can they fire on us?”

“How the fuck should I know? Go!”

Marianne sat down in the seat Judy vacated, the drop into the chair a harder jar to her aching body than she expected. She said loudly, “Mest’! This is Dr. Marianne Jenner.”

Sudden silence. “I am on the Venture.” Maybe if she used simple words, someone aboard the Mest’ would know enough English to understand. Although the Mest’ had taken off as suddenly as the Venture and so was probably without a linguist. “We will not fire. This is a mistake!”

A torrent of Russian answered her.

“I don’t know what they’re saying!”

“They’re moving closer,” Judy said. She had taken Wilshire’s chair. And then, very softly, “I can fire first.”

“What? No!”

“Marianne, I’m not getting blown up when there’s a way I can defend myself.”

“You have no reason to think they’ll—”

“Why else are they moving closer?”

Marianne’s guts churned. She hadn’t known, hadn’t suspected this side of Judy. The Russian torrent became more insistent. Marianne said, “Nyet! Nyet! We will not fire! We will land our ship!”

More Russian.

Then Colin said at her elbow, “Say this, Grandma: ‘Sdayus.’ It means ‘I surrender.’”

“What… how do you know that, Colin?”

He hung his head. “Ataka! The game you wouldn’t let me and Jason play.”

A tremor shook her whole body. “Can you say, ‘I will not fire’?”

“You said that was a bad game.”

“Tell me.”

“It might not be right.”

“Tell me anyway! ‘I will not fire.’”

He screwed up his little face. “I think… maybe… it’s sort of like ‘Strelyat’ ne budu.’ That’s what Ivan says in level two when he puts down his gun.”

Marianne repeated the strange sounds, twice.

No response.

She turned back to Colin. Can you say, ‘We both should land now’?”

He shook his head.

“Try, Colin! Maybe ‘We go back now’?”

“What if I get it wrong?”

Then we all die. Her six-year-old grandchild looked at her from clear gray eyes. Colin’s little body stood stiffly beside her elbow. His lip trembled. She had no idea how much of this he understood.

She said gently, “Do the best you can, Col. ‘We go back now together.’”

“Maybe… ‘Poshli obratno umeste’?”

She said to the unseen Russians, “Poshli obratno umeste,” and held her breath.

A long silence. At the other console, Judy did something. Arming warheads?

She cried, “We go back together now! Poshli obratno umeste!”

Another eternity, and then a heavily accented voice said, “You first.”

Judy didn’t know how to land the Venture. However, she didn’t need to. As soon as she opened the communications frequency, NASA ground control took over. People who had worked on the United States Deneb ship destroyed by the superstorm three years ago were hastily brought online. It seemed there were hundreds of people who understood how to control the Deneb crafts, if not the underlying forces that animated them.

Not, Marianne thought, unlike human minds.

Stubbins, lying on the cabin floor, worked steadily and ineffectively at Marianne’s duct tape and made noises around the sock in his mouth. Both women ignored him. Marianne sat in the captain’s chair, Colin on her lap. Judy, in what had been Wilshire’s chair, followed instructions from NASA—push that button, then these two simultaneously, then—and the ship took over. The Venture landed lightly as a butterfly in the no-man’s land between the inner and outer fences of its building site. Immediately the ship was surrounded and besieged.

Judy sagged in the chair, her broken arm dangling at her side. Once the ship was down, she allowed her face to contort in the full assault of pain.

“Venture,” said a man’s voice on the encrypted channel that served the building site, “this is the FBI.”

Stubbins groaned.

“Who am I talking to?” said the FBI—Marianne incongruously pictured the entire Hoover Building squatting on the Pennsylvania scrub—in a calm, subtly reassuring voice. “Jonah Stubbins?”

“No,” Judy said. “This is—” She moved in her chair and gasped with sudden pain.

“Let me,” Marianne said. She put Colin down as far away from Stubbins as possible in the cramped space and stood behind Judy. Public speaking was what she did. “This is Dr. Marianne Jenner. Dr. Judith Taunton and I are in control of the bridge, and Jonah Stubbins is in our custody for assault, attempted murder, and bioterrorism. Dr. Taunton is injured.”

“This is Special Agent in Charge Jack Warfield. Are you coming out of the Venture, Dr. Jenner?”

“Yes, of course we are. But first we need help. An engineer, Eric Wilshire, is somewhere else in the ship, I don’t know where. He may have found weapons. I have a child with me here. I can’t open the door from the bridge to the main cabin until I know we’ll be safe.”

A long pause. Then Agent Warfield said in that same hostage-negotiator voice, “I see. Why might Eric Wilshire be a threat to you?”

Because we’ve hog-tied his boss and killed two other men. Marianne didn’t say this. Whatever she did say now was going to be very important. There were going to be investigations, hearings, maybe even trials for murder. She needed to present everything in the best possible light.

She said, “Has the Russian spaceship returned to Earth? We made an agreement with them that both ships would land and avert any kind of international problems. That was our first concern.”

Another long pause. Warfield was conferring with someone, probably several someones. The wall screen showed the people and vehicles around the ship, and a larger mob, probably press, beyond the outer fence.

“Yes,” Warfield finally said. “The Stremlenie has returned to Vostochny, Dr. Jenner. We can send in people to protect you and to tend to Dr. Taunton’s injuries as soon as you release the door lock to the Venture. Can you do that from the bridge?”

“I don’t know how. Judy?”

Judy shook her head.

Colin said, “Some machines are coming.”

“I’m sorry,” Marianne said. “We don’t know how.”

“We have experts here who will explain it.”

Marianne followed NASA’s instructions. They didn’t work. She said, “The lock must be customized.”

“Is Mr. Stubbins conscious? Can he tell you how?”

“He has a sock in his mouth,” Marianne said, and all at once was conscious of her one bare foot. It felt cold. She had to get control of this situation.

“Agent Warfield, I’ll take the sock out of Jonah Stubbins’s mouth, but I don’t know if he will cooperate. But before we do that, I want to tell you for the record exactly what happened here. Step by step. Can I do that? Will you please record this?”

“Certainly,” Warfield said. “We very much appreciate your cooperation, Dr. Jenner. Go ahead.”

Marianne took a deep breath and began. Two sentences in, bullets exploded against the door of the bridge.

“Stop shooting!” Marianne screamed. “Stop!” She ran to Colin and stood between him and the door.

“We’re not shooting,” Warfield said. “It’s not us. Dr. Jenner, are you all right? Can you hear me?”

More bullets, a spray of missiles against the outer door. Wilshire. Could the bullets pierce the door? It was heavy metal, and the lock on this side, Marianne realized for the first time, was a manual bolt because Stubbins’s paranoia had wanted a shield against the digital dexterity of his own crew. A last-ditch fortress. Just in case.

She shouted over the din, “It’s the engineer! Wilshire! He’s firing at the door with some sort of heavy-duty gun, you need to come in and stop him!”

No answer. But then she heard the high-pitched whine of a laser cutter, and the bridge wall screen went dark and shattered. They’d been ready for something like this. They were cutting their way onto the bridge, careful to destroy not the consoles that controlled alien forces nobody understood, but only the human communications devices that everybody did.

Wilshire must have heard it, too. The hail of bullets stopped.

It took an astonishingly short time for the SWAT team, in full armor, to burst through the jagged metal hole onto the bridge. Marianne, with Colin in her arms, said, “I’m Dr. Jenner.” Judy gave the men surrounding her a weary, pain-filled grimace.

Marianne said, “There are mice loose in the ship, infected with a very contagious version of a deadly virus. Do not let any of them escape. I repeat—You cannot let any of those mice escape. Jonah Stubbins was stockpiling dangerous and illegal living weapons of bioterrorism.”

Stubbins, his mouth still stopped with Marianne’s sock, closed his eyes, and every muscle in his huge body sagged with epic, monumental defeat.

CHAPTER 24

S plus 6.9 years

Ryan and Marianne sat in wing chairs in the day room of Oakwood Gardens. The day room looked, Marianne thought, more like a living room in Georgetown than a mental-health center. The distinguished, dark-toned portraits on the wall could have been nineteenth-century ancestors of some senator or congressman. A bouquet of June roses sat on the mantel. The Chippendale bookcases, worn oriental rug, and nautical pillows looked like they belonged to the sort of people who summered at Newport.

They were the only occupants of the room. This was a special visit and the other patients were at lunch. A nurse hovered in the doorway, but the room was so big that her presence didn’t feel obtrusive. Warm rain beat sideways against the tall windows. When Marianne had first arrived, Ryan had seemed troubled by the weather, but now his full attention was on his mother. Because he had seemed so distracted, she had begun to talk.

“The boys are with me, and Luke, too. You don’t know who Luke is, do you? He was living under some murky arrangement with Jonah Stubbins. When Stubbins was arrested for domestic terrorism, I took Luke with me. We’re all living near my old college. The boys are doing fine, you don’t have to worry about them.”

Ryan said nothing. But he looked, for the first time since he’d come to Oakwood, as if what she was saying genuinely mattered to him. She didn’t dare stop talking.

“Judy Taunton will stand trial, too, for killing a man named Andrew Stone. You don’t know about that and I won’t explain it now, but Judy’s attorney is positive that she’ll get off. Actually, a whole bunch of Stubbins’s people are being detained until the FBI sorts out who knew what about the mice.”

Ryan didn’t ask about the mice, and Marianne didn’t explain. Nor did she tell him that no charges had been filed against her for Wolski’s murder; the district attorney had decided it was self-defense. Marianne had no idea how much Ryan understood, or had been told, of what had happened aboard the spaceship. Maybe nothing. She was now talking as much to herself as to him, saying aloud all the things that had kept her awake nights during these last painful months. Once she’d started, she couldn’t stop.

“The Venture has been taken over by the government. Some law about seizing property involved in terrorism. I doubt Stubbins will ever get it back.”

“But you know the strange thing, Ryan? The thing that doesn’t fit? Stubbins’s pharmaceutical company just released the drug he developed for children born after the spore cloud. It fast-tracked through the FDA trials without a single hitch. It blocks ultrasonic and infrasonic hearing, so that those who can’t do what Colin and Luke and Ava can, won’t need Calminex. Won’t be little zombies. Stubbins did that. The same Stubbins that could commit an atrocity like weaponizing HFRS.”

Ryan didn’t even blink. His steady, sharp gaze was a beacon, or her need for a beacon.

“I was wrong,” she said. “Completely wrong, a hundred eighty degrees wrong. But I thought that by urging the spaceship to be built no matter what, I was helping promote human cooperation and brotherhood. That’s how I felt when I was researching aboard the Embassy. When Harrison and I were running the Star Foundation. When I was helping Stubbins get to World. I thought that because Worlders and Terrans are both human and not separated by much evolutionary time, we should just establish open communication.”

She let her hands rise, then fall back to her lap. Ryan’s gaze stayed on her face.

“But I was wrong. It can’t be that simple. We can’t have an open highway between Earth and World. It has to be… oh, I don’t know, a toll road. With checkpoints so that not everyone with the money and expertise can just drive past. Because you were right, Ryan. You were right all along.”

His eyes, so completely without Noah’s and Elizabeth’s beauty, sharpened.

“No,” Marianne corrected herself, “you weren’t completely right. You were right to say that on World, we would be an invasive species. An organism not in its native ecological niche, infecting the Worlders with pathogens like Jonah Stubbins. He was a pathogen, yes. But the answer isn’t to never go to World, or anywhere else. The answer is to do what Noah did, to slowly infect each other. In a controlled way. With restrictions on who can go to World, and why. And on who can come here. A slow journey toward brotherhood. Like any two clans would have done when our species was still whole, on the savannah, before Worlders left us in the first place.”

Ryan said something, very low.

“I’m sorry,” Marianne said, “I didn’t hear you? Ryan?”

He said, “I did it.”

She didn’t ask what he meant. She knew. Knew, too, that this secret was what had been destroying him ever since the Embassy bombing. Marianne’s heart shattered and rose into her throat; she couldn’t breathe. Her son had arranged for Evan’s death, for the deaths of the other scientists—

He said, “I gave them the layout of the Embassy, that you told me about. I never thought they’d bring in a bomb. It was supposed to be just a group of spokespeople, with all our arguments against the Denebs’ presence, I never thought they’d… but that doesn’t change my responsibility. I told them. I did it.”

Marianne breathed again.

“No, Ryan—no. If you believed it would be only a peaceful protest, if you didn’t know about the bomb… You can’t destroy yourself with guilt because you were wrong! Everybody is wrong sometimes!” And then, as much to herself as to him, “You can’t control everything.”

Not ecologies, not economies, not superstorms or spore clouds or invasive species. Not one’s own children.

Ryan said nothing. Marianne tried to calm herself; she was shaking. The silence stretched on and on.

Finally Ryan said the same words he’d been uttering for months. This time, however, he said them not as a cry for an uncapturable past, but with their real meaning. “Mom… I want to go home.”

Marianne gazed at him. She saw Ryan the sturdy little boy, tagging after Elizabeth. Ryan the quiet, secretive teen. Ryan the angry conspirator, holding his anger inside. Ryan the invalid, ravaged by his own failure. This was the way it was with one’s children; all the versions of them lived simultaneously in your heart.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go home.”