Key’s favorite food is umeboshi. Salty and tart and bright red, with that pit in the center to beware. She loves it in rice balls, the kind her Japanese grandmother made when she was little. She loves it by itself, the way she ate it at fifteen, after Obachan died. She hasn’t had umeboshi in eighteen years, but sometimes she thinks that when she dies she’ll taste one again.
This morning she eats the same thing she eats every meaclass="underline" a nutritious brick patty, precisely five inches square and two inches deep, colored puce. Her raw scrubbed hands still have a pink tinge of Jeb’s blood in the cuticles. She stares at them while she sips the accompanying beverage, which is orange. She can’t remember if it ever resembled the fruit.
She eats this because that is what every human eats in the Mauna Kea facility. Because the patty is easy to manufacture and soft enough to eat with plastic spoons. Key hasn’t seen a fork in years, a knife in more than a decade. The vampires maintain tight control over all items with the potential to draw blood. Yet humans are tool-making creatures, and their desires, even nihilistic ones, have a creative power that no vampire has the imagination or agility to anticipate. How else to explain the shiv, handcrafted over secret months from the wood cover and glue-matted pages of A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i, the book that Jeb used to read in the hours after his feeding sessions, sometimes aloud, to whatever humans would listen? He took the only thing that gave him pleasure in the world, destroyed it—or recreated it—and slit his veins with it. Mr. Charles questioned her particularly; he knew that she and Jeb used to talk sometimes. Had she known that the boy was like this? He gestured with pallid hands at the splatter of arterial pulses from jaggedly slit wrists: oxidized brown, inedible, mocking.
No, she said, of course not, Mr. Charles. I report any suspected cases of self-waste immediately.
She reports any suspected cases. And so, for the weeks she has watched Jeb hardly eating across the mess hall, noticed how he staggered from the feeding rooms, recognized the frigid rebuff in his responses to her questions, she has very carefully refused to suspect.
Today, just before dawn, she choked on the fruits of her indifference. He slit his wrists and femoral arteries. He smeared the blood over his face and buttocks and genitals, and he waited to die before the vampire technician could arrive to drain him.
Not many humans self-waste. Most think about it, but Key never has, not since the invasion of the Big Island. Unlike other humans, she has someone she’s waiting for. The one she loves, the one she prays will reward her patience. During her years as overseer, Key has successfully stopped three acts of self-waste. She has failed twice. Jeb is different; Mr. Charles sensed it somehow, but vampires can only read human minds through human blood. Mr. Charles hasn’t drunk from Key in years. And what could he learn, even if he did? He can’t drink thoughts she has spent most of her life refusing to have.
Mr. Charles calls her to the main office the next night, between feeding shifts. She is terrified, like she always is, of what they might do. She is thinking of Jeb and wondering how Mr. Charles has taken the loss of an investment. She is wondering how fast she will die in the work camp on Lanai.
But Mr. Charles has an offer, not a death sentence.
“You know… of the facility on Oahu? Grade Gold?”
“Yes,” Key says. Just that, because she learned early not to betray herself to them unnecessarily, and the man at Grade Gold has always been her greatest betrayer.
No, not a man, Key tells herself for the hundredth, the thousandth time. He is one of them.
Mr. Charles sits in a hanging chair shaped like an egg with plush red velvet cushions. He wears a black suit with steel gray pinstripes, sharply tailored. The cuffs are high and his feet are bare, white as talcum powder and long and bony like spiny fish. His veins are prominent and round and milky blue. Mr. Charles is vain about his feet.
He does not sit up to speak to Key. She can hardly see his face behind the shadow cast by the overhanging top of the egg. All vampires speak deliberately, but Mr. Charles drags out his tones until you feel you might tip over from waiting on the next syllable. It goes up and down like a calliope—
“…what do you say to heading down there and sorting the matter… out?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Charles,” she says carefully, because she has lost the thread of his monologue. “What matter?”
He explains: a Grade Gold human girl has killed herself. It is a disaster that outshadows the loss of Jeb.
“You would not believe the expense taken to keep those humans Grade Gold standard.”
“What would I do?”
“Take it in hand, of course. It seems our small… Grade Orange operation has gotten some notice. Tetsuo asked for you… particularly.”
“Tetsuo?” She hasn’t said the name out loud in years. Her voice catches on the second syllable.
“Mr. Tetsuo,” Mr. Charles says, and waves a hand at her. He holds a sheet of paper, the same shade as his skin. “He wrote you a letter.”
Key can’t move, doesn’t reach out to take it, and so it flutters to the black marble floor a few feet away from Mr. Charles’s egg.
He leans forward. “I think… I remember something… you and Tetsuo…”
“He recommended my promotion here,” Key says, after a moment. It seems the safest phrasing. Mr. Charles would have remembered this eventually; vampires are slow, but inexorable.
The diffuse light from the paper lanterns catches the bottom half of his face, highlighting the deep cleft in his chin. It twitches in faint surprise. “You were his pet?”
Key winces. She remembers the years she spent at his side during and after the wars, catching scraps in his wake, despised by every human who saw her there. She waited for him to see how much she had sacrificed and give her the only reward that could matter after what she’d done. Instead he had her shunt removed and sent her to Grade Orange. She has not seen or heard from him in four years. His pet, yes, that’s as good a name as any—but he never drank from her. Not once.
Mr. Charles’s lips, just a shade of white darker than his skin, open like a hole in a cloud. “And he wants you back. How do you feel?”
Terrified. Awestruck. Confused. “Grateful,” she says.
The hole smiles. “Grateful! How interesting. Come here, girl. I believe I shall have a taste.”
She grabs the letter with shaking fingers and folds it inside a pocket of her red uniform. She stands in front of Mr. Charles.
“Well?” he says.
She hasn’t had a shunt in years, though she can still feel its ridged scar in the crook of her arm. Without it, feeding from her is messy, violent. Traditional, Mr. Charles might say. Her fingers hurt as she unzips the collar. Her muscles feel sore, the bones in her spine arthritic and old as she bows her head, leans closer to Mr. Charles. She waits for him to bare his fangs, to pierce her vein, to suck her blood.
He takes more than he should. He drinks until her fingers and toes twinge, until her neck throbs, until the red velvet of his seat fades to gray. When he finishes, he leaves her blood on his mouth.
“I forgive… you for the boy,” he says.
Jeb cut his own arteries, left his good blood all over the floor. Mr. Charles abhors waste above all else.
Mr. Charles will explain the situation. I wish you to come. If you do well, I have been authorized to offer you the highest reward.