“Don’t think about it, honey,” he’d said. “Just do.”
Just do. I opened my mouth—to say what, I don’t know—and felt hot liquid splatter me. An exit wound had opened in his chest, spraying his blood all around. People screamed and backed away. I screamed. I didn’t see where the shot had come from, only that it had come.
The blood moved slowly, more slowly than I would have expected.
He fell forward and I knew I wouldn’t be able to move him, I wouldn’t be able to grab the credit slip, wouldn’t be able to get to Colony Latina, wouldn’t have to do the job.
Faces, unbloodied faces, appeared around me.
They hadn’t killed him for the slip.
I turned and ran, as he once told me to do, ran as fast as I could, blasting as I went, watching people duck or cover their ears or wrap their arms around their heads.
I ran until I saw the sign.
The tiny prefab with the Red Crescent painted on its door, the Red Cross on its windows. I stopped blasting and tumbled inside, bloody, terrified, and completely alone.
I woke up to find my husband’s arms around me, my head buried in his shoulder. He was rocking me as if I were one of the girls, murmuring in my ear, cradling me and making me feel safe. I was crying and shaking, my throat raw with tears or with the aftereffects of screams.
Our door was shut and locked, something that we only did when we were amorous. He must have had House do it, so no one would walk in on us.
He stroked my hair, wiped the tears from my face. “You should leave your link on at night,” he said tenderly. “I could have manipulated the dream, made it into something pleasant.”
We used to do that for each other when we were first married. It had been a way to mesh our different sexual needs, a way to discover each other’s thoughts and desires.
We hadn’t done it in a long, long time.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked.
So I did.
He buried his face in my hair. It had been a long time since he had done that, too, since he had shown that kind of vulnerability with me.
“It’s Echea,” he said.
“I know,” I said. That much was obvious. I had been thinking about her so much that she had worked her way into my dreams.
“No,” he said. “It’s nothing to be calm about.” He sat up, kept his hand on me, and peered into my face. “First Susan, then you. It’s like she’s a poison that’s infecting my family.”
The moment of closeness shattered. I didn’t pull away from him, but it took great control not to. “She’s our child.”
“No,” he said. “She’s someone else’s child, and she’s disrupting our household.”
“Babies disrupt households. It took a while, but you accepted that.”
“And if Echea had come to us as a baby, I would have accepted her. But she didn’t. She has problems that we did not expect.”
“The documents we signed said that we must treat those problems as our own.”
His grip on my shoulder grew tighter. He probably didn’t realize he was doing it. “They also said that the child had been inspected and was guaranteed illness free.”
“You think some kind of illness is causing these dreams? That they’re being passed from Echea to us like a virus?”
“Aren’t they?” he asked. “Susan dreamed of a man who died. Someone whom she didn’t want to go. Then ‘they’ pulled her away from him. You dream of your father’s death—”
“They’re different,” I said. “Susan dreamed of a man’s face exploding, and being captured. I dreamed of a man being shot, and of running away.”
“But those are just details.”
“Dream details,” I said. “We’ve all been talking to Echea. I’m sure that some of her memories have woven their way into our dreams, just as our daily experiences do, or the vids we’ve seen. It’s not that unusual.”
“There were no night terrors in this household until she came,” he said.
“And no one had gone through any trauma until she arrived, either.” I pulled away from him now. “What we’ve gone through is small compared to her. Your parents’ deaths, mine, the birth of the girls, a few bad investments, these things are all minor. We still live in the house you were born in. We swim in the lake of our childhood. We have grown wealthier. We have wonderful daughters. That’s why we took Echea.”
“To learn trauma?”
“No,” I said. “Because we could take her, and so many others can’t.”
He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “But I don’t want trauma in this house. I don’t want to be disturbed any more. She’s not our child. Let’s let her become someone else’s problem.”
I sighed. “If we do that, we’ll still have trauma. The government will sue. We’ll have legal bills up to our eyeballs. We did sign documents covering these things.”
“They said if the child was defective, we could send her back.”
I shook my head. “And we signed even more documents that said she was fine. We waived that right.”
He bowed his head. Small strands of gray circled his crown. I had never noticed them before.
“I don’t want her here,” he said.
I put a hand on his. He had felt that way about Kally, early on. He had hated the way an infant disrupted our routine. He had hated the midnight feedings, had tried to get me to hire a wet nurse, and then a nanny. He had wanted someone else to raise our children because they inconvenienced him.
And yet the pregnancies had been his idea, just like Echea had been. He would get enthusiastic, and then when reality settled in, he would forget the initial impulse.
In the old days we had compromised. No wet nurse, but a nanny. His sleep undisturbed, but mine disrupted. My choice, not his. As the girls got older, he found his own ways to delight in them.
“You haven’t spent any time with her,” I said. “Get to know her. See what she’s really like. She’s a delightful child. You’ll see.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want nightmares,” he said, but I heard capitulation in his voice.
“I’ll leave my interface on at night,” I said. “We can even link when we sleep and manipulate each other’s dreams.”
He raised his head, smiling, suddenly looking boyish, like the man who proposed to me, all those years ago. “Like old times,” he said.
I smiled back, irritation gone. “Just like old times,” I said.
The nanny had offered to take Echea to Ronald’s, but I insisted, even though the thought of seeing him so close to a comfortable intimacy with my husband made me uneasy. Ronald’s main offices were over fifteen minutes away by shuttle. He was in a decade-old office park near the Mississippi, not too far from St. Paul’s new capitol building. Ronald’s building was ail glass on the river side. It stood on stilts—the Mississippi had flooded abominably in ’45, and the city still hadn’t recovered from the shock—and to get to the main entrance, visitors needed a lift code. Ronald had given me one when I made the appointment.
Echea had been silent during the entire trip. The shuttle had terrified her, and it didn’t take long to figure out why. Each time she had traveled by shuttle, she had gone to a new home. I reassured her that would not happen this time, but I could tell she thought I lied.
When she saw the building, she grabbed my hand.
“I’ll be good,” she whispered.
“You’ve been fine so far,” I said, wishing my husband could see her now. For all his demonizing, he failed to realize she was just a little girl.
“Don’t leave me here.”
“I don’t plan to,” I said.