“The clients have another half hour,” she whispers. “I can’t leave until then.”
Kaipo tugs on the long lock of glossy black hair that he has blunt-cut over his left eye. “I’m scared for her, Key,” he says. “She won’t listen to anyone else.”
She will blame herself if any of the kids here tonight die, and she will blame herself if something happens to Rachel. Her hands make the decision for her: she reaches for Kaipo’s left arm. He lets her take it reflexively, and doesn’t flinch when she lifts his shunt. She looks for and finds the small electrical chip which controls the inflow and outflow of blood and other fluids. She taps the Morse-like code, and Kaipo watches with his mouth open as the glittering plastic polymer changes from clear to gray. As though he’s already been tapped out.
“I’m not supposed to show you that,” she says, and smiles until she remembers Tetsuo and what he might think. “Stay here. Make sure nothing happens. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She stays only long enough to see his agreement, and then she’s flying out the back door, through the garden, down the left-hand path that leads to unit two.
Rachel is on her hands and knees in the middle of the walkway. The other three kids in unit two watch her silently from the doorway, but Rachel is alone as she vomits in the grass.
“You!” Rachel says when she sees Key, and starts to cough.
Rachel looks like a war is being fought inside of her, as if the battlefield is her lungs and the hollows of her cheeks and the muscles of her neck. She trembles and can hardly raise her head.
“Go away!” Rachel screams, but she’s not looking at Key, she’s looking down at the ground.
“Rachel, what’s happened?” Key doesn’t get too close. Rachel’s fury frightens her; she doesn’t understand this kind of rage. Rachel raises her shaking hands and starts hitting herself, pounding her chest and rib cage and stomach with violence made even more frightening by her weakness. Key kneels in front of her, grabs both of the girl’s tiny, bruised wrists and holds them away from her body. Her vomit smells of sour bile and the sickly-sweet of some half digested fruit. A suspicion nibbles at Key, and so she looks to the left, where Rachel has vomited.
Dozens and dozens of black seeds, half crushed. And a slime of green the precise shade of a cherimoya skin.
“Oh, God, Rachel… why would you…”
“You don’t deserve him! He can make it go away and he won’t! Who are you? A fogey, an ugly fogey, an ugly usurping fogey and she’s gone and he is a dick, he is a screaming howler monkey and I hate him…”
Rachel collapses against Key’s chest, her hands beating helplessly at the ground. Key takes her up and rocks her back and forth, crying while she thinks of how close she came to repeating the mistakes of Jeb. But she can still save Rachel. She can still be human.
Tetsuo returns three days later with a guest.
She has never seen Mr. Charles wear shoes before, and he walks in them with the mincing confusion of a young girl forced to wear zori for a formal occasion. She bows her head when she sees him, hoping to hide her fear. Has he come to take her back to Mauna Kea? The thought of returning to those antiseptic feeding rooms and tasteless brick patties makes her hands shake. It makes her wonder if she would not be better off taking Penelope’s way out rather than seeing the place where Jeb killed himself again.
But even as she thinks it, she knows she won’t, any more than she would have eighteen years ago. She’s too much a coward and she’s too brave. If Mr. Charles asks her to go back she will say yes.
Rain on a mountainside and sexless, sweet touches with a man the same temperature as wet wood. Lanai City, overrun. Then Waimea, then Honoka’a. Then Hilo, where her mother had been living. For a year, until Tetsuo found that record of her existence in a work camp, Key fantasized about her mother escaping on a boat to an atoll, living in a group of refugee humans who survived the apocalypse.
Every thing Tetsuo asked of her, she did. She loved him from the moment they saved each other’s lives. She has always said yes.
“Key!” Mr. Charles says to her, as though she is a friend he has run into unexpectedly. “I have something… you might just want.”
“Yes, Mr. Charles?” she says.
The three of them are alone in the feeding house. Mr. Charles collapses dramatically against one of the divans and kicks off his tight, patent-leather shoes as if they are barnacles. He wears no socks.
“There,” he says, and waves his hand at the door. “In the bag.”
Tetsuo nods and so she walks back. The bag is black canvas, unmarked. Inside, there’s a book. She recognizes it immediately, though she only saw it once. The Blind Watchmaker. There is a note on the cover. The handwriting is large and uneven and painstaking, that of someone familiar with words but unaccustomed to writing them down. She notes painfully that he writes his “a” the same way as a typeset font, with the half-c above the main body and a careful serif at the end.
Dear Overseer Ki,
I would like you to have this. I have loved it very much and you are the only one who ever seemed to care. I am angry but
I don’t blame you. You’re just too good at living.
Jeb
She takes the bag and leaves both vampires without requesting permission. Mr. Charles’s laugh follows her out the door.
Blood on the walls, on the floor, all over his body.
I am angry but. You’re just too good at living. She has always said yes.
She is too much of a coward and she is too brave.
She watches the sunset the next evening from the hill in the garden, her back against the cherimoya tree. She feels the sun’s death like she always has, with quiet joy. Awareness floods her: the musk of wet grass crushed beneath her bare toes, salt-spray and algae blowing from the ocean, the love she has clung to so fiercely since she was a girl, lost and alone. Everything she has ever loved is bound in that sunset, the red and violet orb that could kill him as it sinks into the ocean.
Her favorite time of day is sunset, but it is not night. She has never quite been able to fit inside his darkness, no matter how hard she tried. She has been too good at living, but perhaps it’s not too late to change.
She can’t take the path of Penelope or Jeb, but that has never been the only way. She remembers stories that reached Grade Orange from the work camps, half-whispered reports of humans who sat at their assembly lines and refused to lift their hands. Harvesters who drained gasoline from their combine engines and waited for the vampires to find them. If every human refused to cooperate, vampire society would crumble in a week. Still, she has no illusions about this third path sparking a revolution. This is simply all she can do: sit under the cherimoya tree and refuse. They will kill her, but she will have chosen to be human.
The sun descends. She falls asleep against the tree and dreams of the girl who never was, the one who opened the door. In her dreams, the sun burns her skin and her obachan tells her how proud she is while they pick strawberries in the garden. She eats an umeboshi that tastes of blood and salt, and when she swallows, the flavors swarm out of her throat, bubbling into her neck and jaw and ears. Flavors become emotions become thoughts; peace in the nape of her neck, obligation in her back molars, and hope just behind her eyes, bitter as a watermelon rind.
She opens them and sees Tetsuo on his knees before her. Blood smears his mouth. She does not know what to think when he kisses her, except that she can’t even feel the pinprick pain where his teeth broke her skin. He has never fed from her before. They have never kissed before. She feels like she is floating, but nothing else.