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It’s who we are.
My best-and-only friend and me.
He rummages in his pocket, then pushes something into my hands, suddenly shy. “All right, I’ll hurry it up. Your first present.”
I look down. A lone blue glass bead rolls between my fingers. A slender leather cord loops in a circle around it.
A necklace.
It’s the blue of the sky, of my eyes, of the ocean.
“Ro,” I breathe. “It’s perfect.”
“It reminded me of you. It’s the water, see? So you can always keep it with you.” His face reddens as he tries to explain, the words sticking in his mouth. “I know—how it makes you feel.”
Peaceful. Permanent. Unbroken.
“Bigger helped me with the cord. It used to be part of a saddle.” Ro has an eye for things like that, things other people overlook. Bigger, the Mission cook, is the same way, and the two of them are inseparable. Biggest, Bigger’s wife, tries her best to keep both of them out of trouble.
“I love it.” I thread my arm around his neck in a rough hug. Not so much an embrace as a cuff of arms, the clench of friends and family.
Ro looks embarrassed, all the same. “It’s not your whole present. For that you have to climb a little farther.”
“But it’s not even my birthday yet.”
“It’s your birthday eve. I thought it was only fair to start tonight. Besides, this kind of present is best after sundown.” Ro holds out his hand, a wicked look in his eyes.
“Come on. Just one little hint.” I squint up at him and he grins.
“But it’s a surprise.”
“You’re making me hike all this way through the brush.”
He laughs. “Okay. It’s the last thing you’d ever expect. The very last thing.” He bounces up and down a bit where he stands, and I can tell he’s practically ready to bolt up the mountain.
“What are you talking about?”
He shakes his head, holding out his hand again. “You’ll see.”
I take it. There’s no getting Ro to talk when he doesn’t want to. Besides, his hand in mine is a good thing.
I feel the beating of his heart, the pulse of his adrenaline. Even now, when he’s relaxed and hiking, and it’s just the two of us. He is a coiled spring. He has no resting state, not really.
Not Ro.
A shadow crosses the hillside, and instinctively we dive for cover under the brush. The ship in the sky is sleek and silver, glinting ominously with the last reflective rays of the setting sun. I shiver, even though I’m not at all cold, and my face is half buried in Ro’s warm shoulder.
I can’t help it.
Ro murmurs into my ear as if he is talking to one of the Padre’s puppies. It’s more his tone than the words—that’s how you speak to scared animals. “Don’t be afraid, Dol. It’s headed up the coast, probably to Goldengate. They never come this far inland, not here. They’re not coming for us.”
“You don’t know that.” The words sound grim in my mouth, but they’re true.
“I do.”
He slips his arm around me and we wait like that until the sky is clear.
Because he doesn’t know. Not really.
People have hidden in these bushes for centuries, long before us. Long before there were ships in the skies.
First the Chumash lived here, then the Rancheros, then the Spanish missionaries, then the Californians, then the Americans, then the Grass. Which is me, at least since the Padre brought me back as a baby to La Purísima, our old Grass Mission, in the hills beyond the ocean.
These hills.
The Padre tells it like a story; he was on a crew searching for survivors in the silent city after The Day, only there were none. Whole city blocks were quiet as rain. Finally, he heard a tiny sound—so small, he thought he was imagining it—and there I was, crying purple-faced in my crib. He wrapped me in his coat and brought me home, just as he now brings us stray dogs.
It was also the Padre who taught me the history of these hills as we sat by the fire at night, along with the constellations of the stars and the phases of the moon. The names of the people who knew our land before we did.
Maybe it was supposed to be like this. Maybe this, the Occupation, the Embassies, all of it, maybe this is just another part of nature. Like the seasons of a year, or how a caterpillar turns into a cocoon. The water cycle. The tides.
Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass.
Sometimes I repeat the names of my people, all the people who have ever lived in my Mission. I say the names and I think, I am them and they are me.
I am the Misíon La Purísima de Concepción de la Santísima Virgen María, founded in Las Californias on the Day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, on the Eighth Day of the Twelfth Month of the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred Eighty-Seven. Three hundred years ago.
Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass.
When I say the names they’re not gone, not to me. Nobody died. Nothing ended. We’re still here.
I’m still here.
That’s all I want. To stay. And for Ro to stay, and the Padre. For us to stay safe, everyone here on the Mission.
But as I look back down the mountain I know that nothing stays, and the gold flush and fade of everything tells me that the sun is setting now.
No one can stop it from going. Not even me.
RESEARCH MEMORANDUM: THE HUMANITY PROJECT
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / AMBASSADOR EYES ONLY
To: Ambassador Amare
From: Dr. Huxley-Clarke
Subject: Icon Research
We still can’t be sure how the Icons work. We know, when the Lords came, thirteen Icons fell from the sky, one landing in each of the Earth’s mega-cities. To this day, we still can’t get close enough to examine them. Our best guess is that the Icons generate an immensely powerful electromagnetic field that can halt electrical activity within a certain radius. We believe it is this field that enables the Icons to disrupt or disable all modern technology. It appears the Icons can also shut down any and all chemical processes or reactions within the field.
Note: We call this the “shutdown effect.”
The Day itself proved the ultimate demonstration of this capability, when, as we all know, the Lords activated the Icons and ended all hope of resistance by making an example of Goldengate, São Paulo, Köln-Bonn, Cairo, Mumbai, and Greater Beijing … the so-called Silent Cities.
By the end of The Day, the newly arrived colonists gained complete control of all major population centers on the Seven Continents. An estimated one billion lives ended in an instant, the greatest tragedy in history.
May silence bring them peace.
2
PRESENTS
By the time we reach the top of the hillside, the sky has turned dark as the eggplants in the Mission garden.
Ro pulls me up the last slide of rocks. “Now. Close your eyes.”
“Ro. What have you done?”
“Nothing bad. Nothing that bad.” He looks at me and sighs. “Not this time, anyway. Come on, trust me.”
I don’t close my eyes. Instead, I look into the shadows beneath the scraggly trees in front of me, where someone has built a shack out of scraps of old signboard and rusting tin. The hood of an ancient tractor is lashed to the legs on a faded poster advertising what looks like running shoes.
DO IT.
That’s what the bodiless legs say, in bright white words spilling over the photograph.
“Don’t you trust me?” Ro repeats, keeping his eyes on the shack as if he was showing me his most precious possession.
There is no one I trust more. Ro knows that. He also knows I hate surprises.
I close my eyes.
“Careful. Now, duck.”
Even with my eyes shut, I know when I am inside the shack. I feel the palmetto roof brush against my hair, and I nearly tumble over the roots of the trees surrounding us.
“Wait a second.” He lets go of me. “One. Two. Three. Happy birthday, Dol!”
I open my eyes. I am now holding one end of a string of tiny colored lights that shine in front of me as if they were stars pulled down from the sky itself. The lights weave from my fingers all across the room, in a kind of sparkling circle that begins with me and ends with Ro.
I clap my hands together, lights and all. “Ro! How—? Is that—electric?”
He nods. “Do you like it?” His eyes are twinkling, same as the lights. “Are you surprised?”
“Never in a thousand years would I have guessed it.”
“There’s more.”
He moves to one side. Next to him is a strange-looking contraption with two rusty metal circles connected by a metal bar and a peeling leather seat.
“A bicycle?”
“Sort of. It’s a pedal generator. I saw it in a book that the Padre had, at least the plans for it. Took me about three months to find all the parts. Twenty digits, just for the old bike. And look there—”
He points to two objects sitting on a plank. He takes the string of lights from my hand, and I move to touch a smooth metal artifact.
“Pan-a-sonic?” I sound out the faded type on the side of the first object. It’s some sort of box, and I pick it up, turning it over in my hands.
He answers proudly. “That’s a radio.”
I realize what it is as soon as he says the words, and it’s all I can do not to drop it. Ro doesn’t notice. “People used them to listen to music. I’m not sure it works, though. I haven’t tried it yet.”
I put it down. I know what a radio is. My mother had one. I remember because it dies every time in the dream. When The Day comes. I touch my tangled brown curls self-consciously.
It’s not his fault. He doesn’t know. I’ve never told anyone about the dream, not even the Padre. That’s how badly I don’t want to remember it.
I change the subject. “And this?” I pick up a tiny silver rectangle, not much bigger than my palm. There is a picture of a lone piece of fruit scratched on one side.
Ro smiles. “It’s some kind of memory cell. It plays old songs, right into your ears.” He pulls the rectangle out of my hand. “It’s unbelievable, like listening to the past. But it only works when it has power.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s your present. Power. See? I push the pedals like this, and the friction creates energy.”
He stands on the bike pedals, then drops onto the seat, pushing furiously. The string of colored lights glows in the room, all around me. I can’t help but laugh, it’s so magical—and Ro looks so funny and sweaty.
Ro climbs off the bicycle and kneels in front of a small black box. I see that the string of lights attaches neatly to one side. “That’s the battery. It stores the power.”
“Right here?” The enormous ramifications of what Ro has done begin to hit me. “Ro, we’re not supposed to be messing with this stuff. You know using electricity outside the cities is forbidden. What if someone finds out?”
“Who’s going to find us? In the middle of a Grass Mission? Up a goat hill, in view of a pig farm? You always say you wish you knew more about what it was like, before The Day. Now you can.”
Ro looks earnest, standing there in front of the pile of junk and wires and time.
“Ro,” I say, trying to find the words. “I—”
“What?” He sounds defensive.
“It’s the best present ever.” It’s all I can say, but the words don’t seem like enough. He did this, for me. He’d rebuild every radio and every bicycle and every memory cell in the world for me, if he could. And if he couldn’t, he’d still try if he thought I wanted him to.
That’s who Ro is.
“Really? You like it?” He softens, relieved.
I love it like I love you.
That’s what I want to tell him. But he’s Ro, and he’s my best friend. And he’d rather have the mud scrubbed out of his ears than mushy words whispered in them, so I don’t say anything at all. Instead, I sink down onto the floor and examine the rest of my presents. Ro’s made a frame, out of twisted wire, for my favorite photograph of my mother—the one with dark eyes and a tiny gold cross at her neck.
