“Access main,” I say. The screen glows blue to a portal offering news, weather, and entertainment stations. “Search Q,” I request. A million terms starting with Q come up. Useless. “Search Dylia Benten.” I’m rewarded with a blank search screen. Even her last fencing team site doesn’t show up. “Benten” alone shows a list of things wholly unrelated to my family. I try different combinations: my dad’s name, my name, New Horizons. “Search Dylia and c-u-e. Dylia and q-u-e-u-e. Dylia and k-e-w.”
Nothing, nothing, and nothing.
My eyes well up again. I grab Dyl’s purse and then pull out the book and her holo stud. I trace the embossed lettering on the cover. Twentieth-Century Poetry.
When Dyl was little, I used to read her Silverstein and Stevenson poems before I’d put her to bed. We’d snuggle under the covers, late at night when Dad still hadn’t come home. She’d watch my holo with me as I read and pick out funny pictures to accompany them.
“Smart girls read poetry,” I told her. “You’re going to be smart, right?”
“I want to be like you, Thel,” she’d lisped.
Five years later, here she is, reading poetry. I’ve lectured her on the danger of trading her soul for trendy clothes, assuming there was nothing else in her pretty head. I hate myself right now.
Without thinking, I put her holo stud in my other earlobe. The warmth of my skin boots up the holo, and I pinch it on. Dad gave me voice-access to her holo, so someone could police her transmissions while he was out all the time. But I was always too busy to check.
Her peach-colored screen glows before me, the content headings spin around a lacy globe studded with gems. Music, movies, school textbooks, diary . . .
Diary?
I shouldn’t. It’s not for me. I should respect her privacy.
I rub my dripping nose with a filthy sleeve. Without Dyl, and not knowing for certain when I will see her again, I can’t resist. This diary is the closest thing I have to her.
“Access diary,” I order.
A new spinning globe of sparkling icicles emerges, the entries hanging from them like Christmas ornaments. I select the one entitled “Dad’s Poem.”
Dyl’s delicate face comes on-screen and her eyes settle on me. I never thought her face would ever be so agonizing to look at. It’s just like when I saw the hologram of Dad.
Her voice is musical, tentative. “Dad showed this to me. I just . . . it’s so . . .” Her eyes roam upward, trying to find the words. “He said I would understand what it was about.”
My face burns with quiet jealousy. Why didn’t Dad show it to me? Didn’t he think I could understand it?
“Anyway.” Dyl rubs her nose, and I freeze, because I’m rubbing my nose the same way. “Listen.”
Prayer for My Child
The chill heralds rain.
Replete with tears and wrongs,
The storm blurs in the distance
As I watch my child,
Asleep in the crib.
Dyl reads the entire poem, eight stanzas in all. It’s beautiful. My chest aches as I listen to her voice, to the words.
I replay the poem over and over, until my brain hurts from not blinking. Soon my eyelids droop and I put on my necklace, letting the rhythm of the box’s precise breaths take over. I make a pillow out of the poetry book and leave the holo on, letting Dyl’s voice pulsate in the recesses of dreams blooming in my head.
It was always me, not Dad, who helped Dyl fall asleep all those years. For once, she’ll do me the favor. I’m grateful, even for the pain it brings me. I want the dreams of cribs and Dyl and Dad, and their words melting into uncertain lullabies.
OH, THIS IS WHAT STIFFNESS IS. I am seventeen going on seventy.
Something is attached to my head. In the murky, amber light of morning, I wake to find my cheek firmly embedded in the poetry book’s cover. The floor is hard and more unforgiving than it was last night. I push myself up, and my hand lands painfully on something irregular, both smooth and sharp. I unglue my eyelids to see what it is.
It’s a tiny chunk of plastic. A doll’s head, salmon-pink. The eye color has been scratched off with a fingernail so the sockets gape, empty and blind. The neck is ragged where it was cut off a plastic body. I drop it like it’s poison.
Someone has been in my room.
Whoever it was is gone now. It doesn’t seem as if anything else has been touched. Dyl’s purse is still next to me. I unclasp my necklace and suck in a huge lungful of air.
Slowly my mind clears, and one thought parks itself in my consciousness. I’ve got to find Dyl. Part of the puzzle is why she was taken in the first place. I have no way of knowing who Q is or if he’ll get in touch again, or if he’s an ally or an enemy. The only proactive thing I can do is get to a lab.
I head for the bathroom, peeling off my shredded clothes, and step into the shower. Under the spray, I examine my arms and Cy’s handiwork. There’s a hint of a lingering soreness there, but all the wounds are closed and with hardly a trace of scar. Amazing.
I wrap myself in a tiny towel and head for the closet. Oh frick. There are hangers, but nothing on them. My pile of discarded clothes look like they’ve been gnawed and spit out by a rabid animal. I can’t put those on either. Didn’t Wilbert say that Vera was supposed to show me my room?
“Vera?” I say, using my nicest voice. “Vera, are you there? I’m having some wardrobe issues. Um, can you help me?”
Only a minute later, my room door opens. “You rang, Princess?”
Vera is wearing purple yoga pants and a matching halter top cut low in the front to show off her bouncy green cleavage. Her long brown hair is tidily wrapped in a bun on her head.
I jerk my thumb toward the closet. “I’m sorry, but . . . I need some clothes.” I put on my most helpless expression, which at this point is not a thespian effort at all. “Please, Vera?”
Vera narrows her eyes and eyeballs me critically. “Come with me.” She spins around and marches out of my room.
“But—” I’m still in a towel. Oh well. I don’t really have a choice. I pad behind her, skulking in her magnificent shadow as she leads me down the hallway, turning left, then right, and finally into her room.
At least, I think it’s a room. It could be an indoor jungle. Grow lights cover the ceiling, and every inch of table space is occupied by vines twisting out of control and delicate seedlings trying to grasp the light. Next to a few dwarf palm trees is an old-fashioned tanning bed, its clam-shell halves slightly open, as if ready to bite. I guess that’s where she sleeps. Or grills really big sandwiches, who the hell knows.
Inside her closet are racks of brightly colored clothes. Vera taps her foot, waiting for me to pick something out.
“Look,” I say, “I don’t mean to be ungrateful. But I don’t have that”—I point at Vera’s curvy figure—“and I prefer to hide this,” I say, waving at my own body.
Vera rolls her eyes. She reaches into a drawer and pulls out a wadded bunch of black items. “Take these.” There’s lace on some of the pieces, I can tell already. I’m itchy just thinking about it. “It’s the most conservative lingerie I own, from a few cup sizes ago.” She glances at my chest and I pull the towel tighter. “Never wore it, though. I was an early bloomer.” Bloomer. Ha.
Vera reaches into the back of her closet. “Here,” she says, handing me another dark armful. “Leggings and skirts fit for a nun.”
Before I can look through them, she hooks a perfectly toned arm through mine and I nearly lose my towel in the process. She drags me to another transport and we go up to the top floor (Wilbert’s vertigo-inducing tour is long forgotten—I’m totally lost) and down the hallway to a darkened room.