He couldn’t find the right word.
Jordan was reading now, from some different old book, they all knew so many old books: “Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war, death after life…”
Leisha looked up from the coffin. Her face was set, unyielding. Light from the desert sky washed over the planes of her cheeks, the pale firm lips. She didn’t look at Drew. She glanced at the wind-smoothed stones on either side of Alice’s in the little plot, BECKER EDWARD WATROUS and SUSAN CATHERINE MELLING, and then straight forward, at nothing. At air. But even though no glance passed between them, Drew suddenly knew, from the fluid shapes inside his mind and the rigid shape of Leisha outside it, that he would never bed her. She would never love him as anything but a son, because a son was how she had seen him first, and she didn’t change her major shapes. She couldn’t. She was what she was. So were most people, but for Leisha it was even more true. She didn’t bend, didn’t flex. It was something in her, something from the sleeplessness—no, it was something not in her. Something the very fact of sleeplessness left out. Drew couldn’t define what. But the Sleepless all had it, this inflexibility, this inability to change categories, and because of it Leisha would never love him the way he loved her. Never.
Pain clutched him, so strong that for a moment he couldn’t see Alice’s coffin below him on the ground. Alice, whose love had let Drew grow up in a way Leisha’s never could. His vision cleared and he let the pain flow freely, until it became another shape in his mind, jagged with lacerations but more than itself, more than himself. And so, bearable.
He could never have Leisha.
Then all that was left was Sanctuary.
Drew looked again around the circle. Stella had her face hidden against her husband’s shoulder. Their daughter Alicia rested both hands on the shoulders of her small daughters. Richard had not raised his head; Drew couldn’t see his eyes. Leisha stood alone, the clear desert light revealing her young skin, unlined eyes, rigidly compressed lips.
The word came to Drew, the word he had been hunting for, the word that fit them all, Sleepless mourning their best beloved who had not been one of them and for that very reason was their best beloved:
The word was “pity.”
Miri bent furiously over her terminal. Both the display and the readout said the same thing: This synthetic neurochemical model performed worse than the last one. Or the last two. Or the last ten. Her lab rats, their brains confused by what was supposed to be the answer to Miri’s experiment, stood irresolutely in their brain-scan stalls. The smallest of the three gave up: He lay down and went to sleep.
“T-t-t-terrific,” Miri muttered. What ever made her think she was a biochemical researcher? “Super”—yeah. Sure. Super-incompetent.
Strings of genetic code, phenotypes, enzymes, receptor sites formed and reformed in her head. None of it was any good. Waste, waste. She threw a calibration instrument clear across the lab, guaranteeing it would have to be recalibrated.
“Miri!”
Joan Lucas stood in the doorway, her pretty face twisted as rope. She and Miri had not talked in years. “Miri…”
“Wh-wh-what is it? J-J-J-Joan?”
“It’s Tony. Come right now. He…” Her face twisted even more. Miri felt the blood leave her heart.
“Wh-wh-what?”
“He fell. From the playground. Oh, Miri, come—”
From the playground. From the axis of the orbital…no, that wasn’t possible, the playground was sealed, and after a fall from that height there would be nothing left—
“From the elevator, I mean. The outside. You know how the boys dare each other to ride the outside of the elevator, on the construction ribs, and then duck in the repair hatch—”
Miri hadn’t known. Tony hadn’t told her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. She could only stare at Joan, who was crying. Behind Miri, one of the genemod rats gave a soft squeak.
“Come on!” Joan cried. “He’s still alive!”
Barely. The medical team had already reached him. They worked grimly on the smashed legs and broken shoulder before they moved him to the hospital. Tony’s eyes were closed; one side of his skull was covered with blood.
Miri rode in the emergency skimmer the short distance to the hospital. Doctors whisked Tony away. Miri sat unmoving, unseeing, looking up only when her mother arrived.
“Where is he!” Hermione cried, and a small, cruel part of Miri’s mind wondered if Hermione would finally look directly at her oldest son, now when everything that made looking worthwhile was gone. Tony’s smile. The expression in his eyes. His voice, stammering out his words. Tony’s words.
The brain scan showed massive damage. But, miraculously, consciousness survived. The drugs that dulled his pain also dulled what made him Tony, but Miri knew he was still there, somewhere. She sat by his side, holding his limp hand, hour after hour. People came and went around her but she spoke to none of them, looked at none of them.
Finally the doctor pulled a chair close to hers and put a hand on her shoulder. “Miranda.”
Tony’s eyelids fluttered more that time; she watched carefully—
“Miranda. Listen to me.” He took her chin gently in his hand and pulled her face toward his. “There’s nervous system damage beyond what can regenerate. There might be—we can’t be sure what we’re looking at. We’ve never seen this pattern of damage.”
“N-n-not even on T-T-T-Tabitha S-Selenski?” she said bitterly.
“No. That was different. Tony’s Mallory scans are showing highly aberrant brain activity. Your brother is alive, but he’s suffered major, nonreparable damage to the brain stem, including the raphe nuclei and related structures. Miranda, you know what that means, you research in this area, I have the readouts here for you—”
“I d-d-d-don’t w-w-want to s-s-s-see th-them!”
“Yes,” the doctor said, “You do. Sharifi, talk to her.”
Miri’s father bent over her. She hadn’t realized he was there. “Miri—”
“D-d-d-don’t d-d-do it! N-n-no, D-D-Daddy! N-not to T-T-T-Tony!”
Ricky Keller didn’t pretend to not understand her. Nor did he pretend to a strength Miri knew, under the chaotic horrible strings in her mind, he didn’t possess. Ricky looked at his broken son, then at Miri, and slowly, shoulders stooped, he left the room.
“G-g-get out!” Miri screamed at the doctor, at the nurses, at her mother, who stood closest to the door. Hermione made a small gesture with her hand and they all left her. With Tony.
“N-n-n-no,” she whispered to Tony. Her hand tightened convulsively in his. “I w-w-w-won’t—” The words would not come. Only thoughts, and not in complex strings: in the straight linear narrowness of fear.
I won’t let them. I’ll fight them every way I can. I’m as strong as they are, smarter, we’re Supers, for you I’ll fight; I won’t let them; they can’t stop me from protecting you; no one can stop me—
Jennifer Sharifi stood in the doorway.
“Miranda.”
Miri moved around the foot of the bed, between her grandmother and Tony. She moved slowly, deliberately, never taking her eyes off Jennifer.