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“Ro. It’s beautiful.” I finger each curving copper tendril.
“She’s beautiful.” He shrugs, embarrassed. So I only nod and move on to the next gift, an old book of stories, nicked from the Padre’s bookcase. Not the first time we’ve done that—and I smile at him conspiratorially. Finally, I pick up the music player, examining the white wires. They have soft pieces on the ends, and I fit one into my ear. I look at Ro and laugh, fitting one in his.
Ro clicks a round button on the side of the rectangle. Screaming music streams into the air—I jump and my earpiece goes flying. When I stick it back in, I can almost feel the music. The nest of cardboard and plywood and tin around us is practically vibrating.
We let the music drown out our thoughts and occupy ourselves with singing and shouting—until the door flies open and the night comes tumbling inside. The night, and the Padre.
“DOLORIA MARIA DE LA CRUZ!”
It’s my real name—though no one is supposed to know or say it—and he wields it like a weapon. He must be really angry. The Padre, as red-faced and short as Ro is brown and long, looks like he could flatten us both with one more word.
“FURO COSTAS!”
But I’ve given Ro his own turn with the earphones, and the music is so loud he can’t hear the Padre. Ro’s singing along badly, and dancing worse. I stand frozen in place while the Padre yanks the white cord from Ro’s ear. The Padre holds out his other hand and Ro drops the silver music player into it.
“I see you’ve raided the storage room once more, Furo.”
Ro looks at his feet.
The Padre rips the lights out of the black box, and a spark shoots across the room. The Padre raises an eyebrow.
“You’re lucky you didn’t burn down half the mountain with this contraband,” he says, looking meaningfully at Ro. “Again.”
“So lucky.” Ro snorts. “I think that every day, right before dawn when I get up to feed the pigs.”
The Padre drops the string of lights like a snake. “You realize, of course, that a Sympa patrol could have seen the lights on this mountain all the way down to the Tracks?”
“Don’t you ever get tired of hiding?” Ro glowers.
“That depends. Do you ever get tired of living?” The Padre glares back. Ro says nothing.
The Padre has the look he gets when he’s doing the Mission accounting, hunched over the ledgers he fills with rows of tiny numbers. This time, he is calculating punishments, and multiplying them times two. I tug on his sleeve, looking repentant—a skill I mastered when I was little. “Ro didn’t mean it, Padre. Don’t be angry. He did it for me.”
He cups my chin with one hand, and I feel his fingers on my face. In a flash, I sense him. What comes to me first is worry and fear—not for himself, but for us. He wants to be a wall around us, and he can’t, and it makes him crazy. Mostly, he is patience and caution; he is a globe spinning and a finger tracing roads on a worn map. His heart beats more clearly than most. The Padre remembers everything—he was a grown man when the first Carriers came—and most of what he remembers are the children he has helped. Ro, and me, and all the others who lived at the Mission until they were placed with families.
Then, in my mind’s eye, I see something new.
The image of a book takes shape.
The Padre is wrapping it, with his careful hands. My present.
He smiles at me, and I pretend not to know where his mind is.
“Tomorrow we will speak of bigger things. Not today. It’s not your fault, Dolly. It’s your birthday eve.”
And with that, he winks at Ro and draws his robed arm around me, and we both know all is forgiven.
“Now, come to dinner. Bigger and Biggest are waiting, and if we make them wait much longer, Ramona Jamona will no longer be a guest at our table but the main dish.”
As we slide our way back down the hillside, the Padre curses the bushes that tug at his robes, and Ro and I laugh like the children we were when he first found us. We race, stumbling in the darkness toward the warm yellow glow of the Mission kitchen. I can see the homemade beeswax candles flickering, the hand-cut paper streamers hanging from the rafters.
My birthday eve dinner is a success. Everyone on the Mission is there—almost a dozen people, counting the farmhands and the church workers—all crammed around our long wooden table. Bigger and Biggest have used every cracked plate in the shed. I get to sit in the Padre’s seat, a birthday tradition, and we eat my favorite potato-cheese stew and Bigger’s famous sugar cake and sing old songs by the fire until the moon is high and our eyes are heavy and I fall asleep in my usual warm spot in front of the oven.
When the old nightmare comes—my mother and me and the radio going silent—Ro is there next to me on the floor, asleep with crumbs still on his face and twigs still in his hair.
My thief of junk. Climber of mountains. Builder of worlds.
I rest my head on his back and listen to him breathe. I wonder what tomorrow will bring. What the Padre wants to tell me.
Bigger things, that’s what he said.
I think about bigger things until I am too small and too tired to care.
EMBASSY CITY TRIBUNAL AUTOPSY
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET
Performed by Dr. O. Brad Huxley-Clarke, VPHD
Note: Conducted at the private request of Amb. Amare
Santa Catalina Examination Facility #9B
Also see adjoining DPPT in addendum file.
Deceased Personal Possessions Transcript
Deceased classified as victim of Grass Rebellion uprising. Known to be Person of Interest to Ambassador Amare.
Gender: Female.
Ethnicity: Indeterminate.
Age: Estimate mid-to-late teens. Postadolescent.
Physical Characteristics:
Slightly underweight. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Skin characterized by some discoloration indicative of elemental exposure. Exhibits human protein markers and low body weight indicative of predominantly agrarian diet. Staining patterns on teeth consistent with consumption habits of local Grass cultures.
Distinguishing Physical Markings:
A recognizable
marking
appears inside the specimen’s right wrist. At the Ambassador’s request, a
specimen of the
has been removed, in observance of
security protocols.
.
Cause of Death:
.
Survivors: No identified family.
Note: Body will be cremated following lab processing.
Embassy City Waste Facility Assignment: Landfill
.
3
THE PIETÀ OF LA PURÍSIMA
Feelings are memories.
That’s what I’m thinking as I stand there in the Mission chapel, the morning of my birthday. It’s what the Padre says. He also says that chapels turn regular people into philosophers.
I’m not a regular person, but I’m still no philosopher. And either way, what I remember and how I feel are the only two things I can’t escape, no matter how much I want to.
No matter how hard I try.
For the moment, I tell myself not to think. I focus on trying to see. The chapel is dark but the doorway to outside is blindingly bright. That’s what morning always looks like in the chapel. The little light there prickles and stings my eyes.
Like in the Mission itself, in the chapel you can pretend that nothing has changed for hundreds of years, that nothing has happened. Not like in the Hole, where they say the buildings have fallen into ruins, and Sympa soldiers control the streets with fear, and you think about nothing but The Day, every day.
Los Angeles, that’s what the Hole used to be called. First Los Angeles, then the City of Angels, then the Holy City, then the Hole. When I was little, that’s how I used to think of the House of Lords, as angels. Nobody calls them alien anymore, because they aren’t. They’re familiar. We never see them, but we’ve never known a world without them, not Ro and me. I grew up thinking they were angels because back on The Day they sent my parents to heaven. At least, that’s what the Grass missionaries told me, when I was old enough to ask.
Heaven, not their graves.
Angels, not aliens.
But just because something comes from the sky doesn’t make it an angel. The Lords didn’t come here from the heavens to save us. They came from some faraway solar system to colonize our planet, on The Day. We don’t know what they look like inside their ships, but they’re not angels. They destroyed my family the year I was born. What kind of angel would do that?
Now we call them the House of Lords—and Ambassador Amare, she tells us not to fear them—but we do.
Just as we fear her.
On The Day, the dead dropped silently in their homes, never seeing what hit them. Never knowing anything about our new Lords, about the way they could use their Icons to control the energy that flowed through our own bodies, our machines, our cities.
About how they could stop it.
Either way, my family is gone. There was no reason for me to have survived. Nobody understood why I did.
The Padre suspected, of course. That’s why he took me.
First me, and then Ro.
I hear a sound from the far end of the chapel.
I squint, turning my back to the door.
The Padre has sent for me, but he’s late. I catch the eye of the Lady from the painting on the wall. Her face is so sad, I think she knows what has happened. I think she knows everything. She’s part of what General Ambassador to the Planet Hiro Miyazawa, the head of the United Embassies, calls the old ways of humanity. How we believed in ourselves—how we survived ourselves. What we looked up to, back when we thought there was someone up above.
Not something.
I look back to the Lady a moment longer, until the sadness surges and the pain radiates through me. It pulses from my temples and I feel my mind stumble, folding at the edge of unconsciousness. Something is wrong. It must be, for the familiar ache to come on so suddenly. I press my hand to my temple, willing it to stop. I breathe deep, until I can see clearly.
“Padre?”
My voice echoes against the wood and stone. It sounds as small as I am. An animal has lurched into my leg, one of many more entering the chapel, and my nostrils fill with smells—hair and hides and hooves, paint and mold and manure. My birthday falls on the Blessing of the Animals, which will begin just hours from now. Local Grass farmers and ranchers will come to have the Padre bless their livestock, as they have for three hundred years. It is Grass tradition, and we are a Grass Mission.
Appearing in the door, the Padre smiles at me, moving to light the ceremonial candles. Then his smile fades. “Where’s Furo? Bigger and Biggest haven’t seen him at all this morning.”
I shrug. I can’t account for every second of Ro’s day. Ro could be lifting all the dried cereal cakes out of Bigger’s emergency supplies. Chasing Biggest’s donkeys. Sneaking down the Tracks toward the Hole, to buy more parts for the Padre’s busted-up old pistola, shot only on New Year’s Eve. Meeting people he doesn’t want me to meet, learning things he doesn’t want me to know. Preparing for a war he’ll never fight with an enemy that can’t be defeated.
He’s on his own.
The Padre, preoccupied as always, is no longer paying attention to himself or to me. “Careful …” I catch his elbow, pulling him out of the way of a pile of pig waste. A near miss.
He clicks his tongue and leans down to chuck Ramona Jamona on the chin. “Ramona. Not in the chapel.” It’s an act—really, he doesn’t mind. The big pink pig sleeps in his chamber on cold nights, we all know she does. He loves Ro and me just as he does Ramona—in spite of everything we do and beyond anything he says. He’s the only father we have ever known, and though I call him the Padre, I think of him as my Padre.
“She’s a pig, Padre. She’s going to go wherever she wants. She can’t understand you.”
“Ah, well. It’s only once a year, the Blessing of the Animals. We can clean the floors tomorrow. All Earth’s creatures need our prayers.”
“I know. I don’t mind.” I look to the animals, wondering. The Padre sinks onto a low pew, patting the wood next to him. “We can take a few minutes to ourselves, however. Come. Sit.”
I oblige.
He smiles, touching my chin. “Happy birthday, Dolly.” He holds out a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. It materializes from his robes, a priestly sleight of hand.
Birthday secrets. My book, finally.
I recognize it from his thoughts, from yesterday. He holds it out to me, but his face is not full of joy.
Only sadness.
“Be careful with it. Don’t let it out of your sight. It’s very rare. And it’s about you.”
I drop my hand.
