And this girl, whose sneer reveals her bucked front teeth, has as much chance of understanding that world as Key does of understanding this one. Fresh fruit on the table. No uniforms. And a perfect, glittering shunt of plastic and metal nestled in the crook of her left arm.
“Mine,” Key answers the girl.
Rachel spits; Tetsuo turns his head, just a little, as though he can only bear to see Key from the corner of his eye.
“You’re nothing like her,” she says.
“Like who?”
But the girl storms from the room, leaving her chief vampire without a dismissal. Key now understands this will not be punished. It’s another one—a boy, with the same florid beauty as the girl but far less belligerence, who answers her.
“You look like Penelope,” he says, tugging on a long lock of his asymmetrically cut black hair. “Just older.”
When Tetsuo leaves the room, it’s Key who cannot follow.
Key remembers sixteen. Her obachan is dead and her mother has moved to an apartment in Hilo and it’s just Key and her father in that old, quiet house at the end of the road. The vampires have annexed San Diego and Okinawa is besieged, but life doesn’t feel very different in the mountains of the Big Island.
It is raining in the woods behind her house. Her father has told her to study, but all she’s done since her mother left is read Mishima’s Sea of Fertility novels. She sits on the porch, wondering if it’s better to kill herself or wait for them to come, and just as she thinks she ought to have the courage to die, something rattles in the shed. A rat, she thinks.
But it’s not rat she sees when she pulls open the door on its rusty hinges. It’s a man, crouched between a stack of old appliance boxes and the rusted fender of the Buick her father always meant to fix one day. His hair is wet and slicked back, his white shirt is damp and ripped from shoulder to navel. The skin beneath it is pale as a corpse; bloodless, though the edges of a deep wound are still visible.
“They’ve already come?” Her voice breaks on a whisper. She wanted to finish The Decay of the Angel. She wanted to see her mother once more.
“Shut the door,” he says, crouching in shadow, away from the bar of light streaming through the narrow opening.
“Don’t kill me.”
“We are equally at each other’s mercy.”
She likes the way he speaks. No one told her they could sound so proper. So human. Is there a monster in her shed, or is he something else?
“Why shouldn’t I open it all the way?”
He is brave, whatever else. He takes his long hands from in front of his face and stands, a flower blooming after rain. He is beautiful, though she will not mark that until later. Now, she only notices the steady, patient way he regards her. I could move faster than you, his eyes say. I could kill you first.
She thinks of Mishima and says, “I’m not afraid of death.”
Only when the words leave her mouth does she realize how deeply she has lied. Does he know? Her hands would shake if it weren’t for their grip on the handle.
“I promise,” he says. “I will save you, when the rest of us come.”
What is it worth, a monster’s promise?
She steps inside and shuts out the light.
There are nineteen residents of Grade Gold; the twentieth is buried beneath the kukui tree in the communal garden. The thought of rotting in earth revolts Key. She prefers the bright, fierce heat of a crematorium fire, like the one that consumed Jeb the night before she left Mauna Kea. The ashes fly in the wind, into the ocean and up in the trees, where they lodge in bird nests and caterpillar silk and mud puddles after a storm. The return of flesh to the earth should be fast and final, not the slow mortification of worms and bacteria and carbon gases.
Tetsuo instructs her to keep close watch on unit three. “Rachel isn’t very… steady right now,” he says, as though unaware of the understatement.
The remaining nineteen residents are divided into four units, five kids in each, living together in sprawling ranch houses connected by walkways and gardens. There are walls, of course, but you have to climb a tree to see them. The kids at Grade Gold have more freedom than any human she’s ever encountered since the war, but they’re as bound to this paradise as she was to her mountain.
The vampires who come here stay in a high glass tower right by the beach. During the day, the black-tinted windows gleam like lasers. At night, the vampires come down to feed. There is a fifth house in the residential village, one reserved for clients and their meals. Testsuo orchestrates these encounters, planning each interaction in fine detaiclass="underline" this human with that performance for this distinguished client. Key has grown used to thinking of her fellow humans as food, but now she is forced to reconcile that indelible fact with another, stranger veneer. The vampires who pay so dearly for Grade Gold humans don’t merely want to feed from a shunt. They want to be entertained, talked to, cajoled. The boy who explained about Key’s uncanny resemblance juggles torches. Twin girls from unit three play guitar and sing songs by the Carpenters. Even Rachel, dressed in a gaudy purple mermaid dress with matching streaks in her hair, keeps up a one-way, laughing conversation with a vampire who seems too astonished—or too slow—to reply.
Key has never seen anything like this before. She thought that most vampires regarded humans as walking sacks of food. What pleasure could be derived from speaking with your meal first? From seeing it sing or dance? When she first went with Tetsuo, the other vampires talked about human emotions as if they were flavors of ice cream. But at Grade Orange she grew accustomed to more basic parameters: were the humans fed, were they fertile, did they sleep? Here, she must approve outfits; she must manage dietary preferences and erratic tempers and a dozen other details all crucial to keeping the kids Grade Gold standard. Their former caretaker has been shipped to the work camps, which leaves Key in sole charge of the operation. At least until Tetsuo decides how he will use his dispensation.
Key’s thoughts skitter away from the possibility.
“I didn’t know vampires liked music,” she says, late in the evening, when some of the kids sprawl, exhausted, across couches and cushions. A girl no older than fifteen opens her eyes but hardly moves when a vampire in a gold suit lifts her arm for a nip. Key and Tetsuo are seated together at the far end of the main room, in the bay windows that overlook a cliff and the ocean.
“It’s as interesting to us as any other human pastime.”
“Does music have a taste?”
His wide mouth stretches at the edges; she recognizes it as a smile. “Music has some utility, given the right circumstances.”
She doesn’t quite understand him. The air is redolent with the sweat of human teenagers and the muggy, salty air that blows through the open doors and windows. Her eye catches on a half-eaten strawberry dropped carelessly on the carpet a few feet away. It was harvested too soon, a white, tasteless core surrounded by hard, red flesh.
She thinks there is nothing of “right” in these circumstances, and their utility is, at its bottom, merely that of parasite and host.
“The music enhances the—our—flavor?”
Tetsuo stares at her for a long time, long enough for him to take at least three of his shallow, erratically spaced breaths. To look at him is to taste copper and sea on her tongue; to wait for him is to hear the wind slide down a mountainside an hour before dawn.