Nakamura looked across the room. There, the picture of his grandfather as a boy, during World War II. Kenji Nakamura, the first of his family born in the United States. The picture was in black and white. His grandfather was little more than a toddler. He was in the arms of a beautiful, smiling Japanese woman in a dark coat. In the foreground, between them and the camera, was a chain link fence, topped by barbed wire.
His grandfather and great-grandmother had been interned, made prisoners in their country, while his great-grandfather had gone off to fight for America in World War II. It was the oldest family picture he had, more sentiment than anything else. A photo that represented a different time, the sort of thing that couldn’t happen in America any more.
Except that it could, and it was. ERD had developed new internment plans while he was there, to deal with potential threats like the Aryan Rising clones. Those plans had been quietly nixed. But lately he’d heard from his contacts in ERD that they were being reactivated, upgraded, quietly put at the ready in anticipation of a wave of children born with Nexus.
Jesus.
Nakamura sighed. He’d let himself stay at ERD two years after he’d discovered those plans the first time, until finally one too many deceptions, one too many missions about stopping science instead of guarding the nation had pushed him over the edge.
He’d tried to quit. And when ERD wouldn’t let him quit, he’d turned to McFadden, already a department head at CIA. And McFadden had pulled strings, gotten him reassigned.
When the CIA is the place you turn to for moral clarity, Nakamura thought, you might have a problem.
CIA wanted him to find Lane. Finding Lane most likely meant finding Sam as well. And no one knew Sam better than Nakamura.
When he did find her… Did he trust her? Would she trust him?
Images of Sam filled his mind. Sam at fourteen, coughing in that burning room at Yucca Grove, the first instant he’d seen her, with the gun at her feet and blood pouring from the dead prophet below her. Sam in his arms as he’d jumped from the third-floor window of that burning building. Later, huddled in the blanket he’d put around her shoulders as she watched the ranch where she’d lived and been imprisoned and degraded go up in flames. Sam waiting to hear if her sister or parents had made it out, knowing already what the answer would be…
Sam at fifteen, karate practice, the hours they’d spent together with him teaching her how to protect herself. Her tears and anguish on the one year anniversary of Yucca Grove.
Sam on her sixteenth birthday, in a long black gown, out to the opera with her “uncles” Kevin and Peter, resplendent in their tuxedos.
Sam at eighteen, the target pistol he’d given her as a gift.
“What kind of a gift is a gun?” Peter had asked. But Sam’s eyes had lit up when she’d opened the box, and she’d hugged him tight.
Sam as an ERD trainee, working twice as hard as anyone. So determined. So sure of what was right and what was wrong. So naively loyal. So patriotic.
What happened to you, Sam? What really happened in Bangkok?
He needed answers.
11
CLOUDS ON THE HORIZON
Mid October
Sam almost opened herself to Jake three times that week. The first time was as she watched him work on the old truck, which had broken down again. She watched as he explained what he was doing to a curious Sarai, pointed out the parts and how they worked, handed her the wrench and showed her how to use it.
He’d make a great dad, Sam thought. But that night he was distracted and his mind felt troubled, his head buried in his slate dissecting the budget of the house, line items weighing on him like stones. She let the moment pass.
She decided again two days later, when little Kit fell from the tree he was climbing and his pain and shock lanced through all their minds, and somehow, even though she knew she was faster, Jake was there before she was, shushing Kit and sending soothing thoughts and gently probing the arm the boy had fallen on. She could feel Jake’s calm win the boy over, feel the fatherly awe Kit held Jake in, and it warmed her.
But that night, drunken village teenagers came to their gate and threw insults and stones and bottles. Sat pralat! they shouted. Monsters! You have monster children in there!
A bottle flew over the wall and crashed into one of the windows of the house, sending a spiderweb of cracks out. Jake winced. Sam’s anger rose, and she got up to go show these punks a lesson, but Jake put a hand on her arm.
“They’re just kids, Sunee. Just ignore them.”
Then she felt ashamed.
She decided a third time three nights later, while she waited for him to return from a supply run. She lay awake in the bed that she’d invited him into every night for weeks, and lost herself in the conjoined dream of the children, a riot of forms and shapes and thoughts and memories.
Sam drifted off to sleep, smiling, in love with these magical children, in love with her life, and maybe, maybe just a tiny bit in love with this man.
She woke two hours later. She was alone in the bed. Where was Jake?
She rose, pulled on an oversized shirt for modesty, and padded down to his room. The door was open. His bed hadn’t been slept in.
Frowning, she went outside. The truck was nowhere to be seen. The gate was still shut and locked. It was past midnight now. He was long overdue. A flat? A problem with the truck?
She went inside and tried his phone. It went straight to messages. She checked her own messages. Nothing.
It was probably something simple. A breakdown. A drained phone battery. A reception dead spot.
But Sam sensed trouble.
She pulled on boots and pants, threw water and food in a daypack, and left a terse note for Khun Mae and then a gentler, truth-evading one for Sarai. She slung the pack over her shoulders and headed out the door. Then, as an afterthought, she went back and grabbed one of the machetes they used to hack back the jungle, and slung that over her shoulder too.
She took the road from the hilltop house to Mae Dong at a jog, her posthuman eyes scanning right and left, picking out rocks and holes in the road in the darkness. She found him nine miles down the road, three miles from the village.
He was on foot, limping, a cut on his brow. His clothes were torn and one eye was black.
“Sunee!” His mind lit up with joy. Beneath it was shame, resignation.
“Jake!” She was on him and then she was kissing his face and holding him close. “What happened?”
He shook his head. “I was dumb. I forgot to fuel up earlier, so I stopped in Mae Dong. They were drunk. Four of ’em. And they recognized me.”
He stopped and leaned against a tree. “They took the truck… all the supplies… Beat the shit out of me.”
“Motherfuckers!” Sam exploded.
“Can you help me home?”
And some part of her wanted to wade into that village, and find those men, and hurt them. But the rest of her knew: that way was the past. She took Jake’s arm over her shoulder. Took as much of his weight as he would give her, and they started the long walk home.
“We’re done,” Jake told her on the walk home.
“What do you mean?” Sam asked.
“The money’s gone. Apsara, the woman who started this place and left it to Khun Mae. She left money behind to run the home when she died. But it’s gone.”
“But we sell the meds from the greenhouse…”
Jake shook his head. “Not enough. There’s food to buy. Repairs for the truck and the house. The doctor’s bills for Aroon last year, for Kit the year before. The bribes…”
“Bribes?”
Jake snorted. “We run an unlicensed orphanage. Our brains are loaded full of a drug that’s still technically illegal. Yeah. Bribes.”