This is the place we brought Echea. A girl who had never really seen green grass or tall trees; who had definitely never seen lakes or blue sky or Earth’s stars. She had, in her brief time in North Dakota, seen what they considered Earth—the brown dust, the fresh air. But her exposure had been limited, and had not really included sunshine or nature itself.
We did not really know how this would affect her.
There were many things we did not know.
Our girls were lined up on the porch in age order: Kally, the twelve-year-old, and the tallest, stood near the door. Susan, the middle child, stood next to her, and Anne stood by herself near the porch. They were properly stair-stepped, three years between them, a separation considered optimal for more than a century now. We had followed the rules in birthing them, as well as in raising them.
Echea was the only thing out of the norm.
Anne, the courageous one, approached us as we got off the shuttle. She was small for six, but still bigger than Echea. Anne also blended our heritages perfectly—my husband’s bright blue eyes and light hair with my dark skin and exotic features. She would be our beauty some day, something my husband claimed was unfair, since she also had the brains.
“Hi,” she said, standing in the middle of the lawn. She wasn’t looking at us. She was looking at Echea.
Echea stopped walking. She had been slightly ahead of me. By stopping, she forced me to stop too.
“I’m not like them,” she said. She was glaring at my daughters. “I don’t want to be.”
“You don’t have to be,” I said softly.
“But you can be civil,” my husband said.
Echea frowned at him, and in that moment, I think, their relationship was defined.
“I suppose you’re the pampered baby,” she said to Anne.
Anne grinned.
“That’s right,” she said. “I like it better than being the spoiled brat.”
I held my breath. “Pampered baby” wasn’t much different from “spoiled brat” and we all knew it.
“Do you have a spoiled brat?” Echea asked.
“No,” Anne said.
Echea looked at the house, the lawn, the lake, and whispered. “You do now.”
Later, my husband told me he heard this as a declaration. I heard it as awe. My daughters saw it as something else entirely.
“I think you have to fight Susan for it,” Anne said.
“Do not!” Susan shouted from the porch.
“See?” Anne said. Then she took Echea’s hand and led her up the steps.
That first night we awakened to screams. I came out of a deep sleep, already sitting up, ready to do battle. At first, I thought my link was on; I had lulled myself to sleep with a bedtime story. My link had an automatic shut-off, but I sometimes forgot to set it. With all that had been happening the last few days, I believed I might have done so again.
Then I noticed my husband sitting up as well, groggily rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
The screams hadn’t stopped. They were piercing, shrill. It took me a moment to recognize them.
Susan.
I was out of bed before I realized it, running down the hall before I had time to grab my robe. My nightgown flapped around me as I ran. My husband was right behind me. I could hear his heavy steps on the hardwood floor.
When we reached Susan’s room, she was sitting on the window seat, sobbing. The light of the full moon cut across the cushions and illuminated the rag rugs and the old-fashioned pink spread.
I sat down beside her and put my arm around her. Her frail shoulders were shaking, and her breath was coming in short gasps. My husband crouched before her, taking her hands in his.
“What happened, sweetheart?” I asked.
“I—I—I saw him,” she said. “His face exploded, and the blood floated down.”
“Were you watching vids again before sleep?” my husband asked in a sympathetic tone. We both knew if she said yes, in the morning she would get yet another lecture about being careful about what she put in her brain before it rested.
“No!” she wailed.
She apparently remembered those early lectures too.
“Then what caused this?” I asked.
“I don’t know!” she said and burst into sobs again. I cradled her against me, but she didn’t loosen her grip on my husband’s hands.
“After his blood floated, what happened, baby?” my husband asked.
“Someone grabbed me,” she said against my gown. “And pulled me away from him. I didn’t want to go.” “And then what?” My husband’s voice was still soft.
“I woke up,” she said, and her breath hitched.
I put my hand on her head and pulled her closer. “It’s all right, sweetheart,” I said. “It was just a dream.”
“But it was so real,” she said.
“You’re here now,” my husband said. “Right here. In your room. And we’re right here with you.”
“I don’t want to go back to sleep,” she said. “Do I have to?”
“Yes,” I said, knowing it was better for her to sleep than be afraid of it. “Tell you what, though. I’ll program House to tell you a soothing story, with a bit of music and maybe a few moving images. What do you say?”
“Dr. Seuss,” she said.
“That’s not always soothing,” my husband said, obviously remembering how the House’s Cat in the Hat program gave Kally a terror of anything feline.
“It is to Susan,” I said gently, reminding him. In her third year, she played Green Eggs and Ham all night, the House’s voice droning on and on, making me thankful that our room was at the opposite end of the hall.
But she was three no longer, and she hadn’t wanted Dr. Seuss for years. The dream had really frightened her.
“If you have any more trouble, baby,” my husband said to her, “you come and get us, all right?”
She nodded. He squeezed her hands, then I picked her up and carried her to bed. My husband pulled back the covers. Susan clung to me as I eased her down. “Will I go back there if I close my eyes?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “You’ll listen to House and sleep deeply. And if you dream at all, it’ll be about nice things, like sunshine on flowers, and the lake in summertime.”
“Promise?” she asked, her voice quavering.
“Promise,” I said. Then I removed her hands from my neck and kissed each of them before putting them on the coverlet. I kissed her forehead. My husband did the same, and as we were leaving, she was ordering up the House reading program.
As I pulled the door closed, I saw the opening images of Green Eggs and Ham flicker across the wall.
The next morning, everything seemed fine. When I came down to breakfast, the chef had already placed the food on the table, each dish on its own warming plate. The scrambled eggs had the slightly runny look that indicated they had sat more than an hour—not even the latest design in warming plates could stop that. In addition, there was French toast, and Susan’s favorites, waffles. The scent of fresh blueberry muffins floated over it all, and made me smile. The household staff had gone to great lengths to make Echea feel welcome.
My husband was already in his usual spot, e-conferencing while he sipped his coffee and broke a muffin apart with his fingers. His plate, showing the remains of eggs and ham, was pushed off to the side.
“Morning,” I said as I slipped into my usual place on the other side of the table. It was made of oak and had been in my family since 1851, when my mother’s people brought it over from Europe as a wedding present for my many-great grandparents. The housekeeper kept it polished to a shine, and she only used linen placemats to protect it from the effects of food.