We needed to stay together where Gordo could keep an eye on us, but that didn’t mean we had to stay awake all night. Professor Navarro had the bright idea of moving sheets and blankets into the living room for makeshift beds, which we did, and he promptly curled up on one of them. Navarro wasn’t one of those elderly people who have trouble sleeping: he snored like a drunken longshoreman.
Amanda stretched out on the sofa, and I was about to move to a blanket on the floor when my phone buzzed. Rachel Ragland’s number. A call at this hour probably meant she was drunk, either belligerent and accusatory or wanting to make tearful amends. I considered ignoring the call. The ugly word “tether” echoed in my head. I took the phone to a vacant corner of the room. “Rachel? What is it?”
But it wasn’t Rachel on the other end. It was her daughter.
“Is that Adam?”
“Suze?” I asked.
“Adam from the beach?”
“Yep, it’s me. What are you doing awake at this hour?”
“I still have the picture you drew of me. I colored it.”
“That’s great. Suze, is your mommy around?”
“Yes but not awake.”
“Maybe you should be asleep, too. Does she know you’re using her phone?”
“No,” she said, and for a moment I mistook the tension in her voice for guilt.
“Well, it’s not a good idea to use your mom’s things without her permission.”
“I’m sorry.” Suddenly she sounded near tears.
“Suze … is something wrong?”
“I wanted to ask her, but she won’t wake up!”
“I don’t understand. Are you at home?”
“Yes!”
“Your mom’s in her bedroom?”
“No! She’s on the couch! I’m looking at her right now!”
“What happens if you try to wake her up?”
“Nothing!”
Amanda overheard some of my end of the conversation—she sat up and gave me a concerned look. No one else was paying attention. Gordo sat by the window, his own phone in his hand, talking to one of his security people. Navarro’s snoring had settled into a growling rhythm, like someone trying to start a chainsaw.
“Go to her now,” I told Suze. “See if she wakes up.”
“Okay…”
“Are you with her?”
“Yes.”
“Can she see you?”
“Her eyes are closed.”
“What if you touch her?”
A pause. “I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to get the blood on me.”
I closed my eyes and said, “Suze, tell me about the blood. Is Mommy hurt?”
“She cuts herself sometimes. Maybe she cut herself too much.”
“Try to wake her up. Say, ‘Mommy, wake up!’ Real loud. Can you do that for me?”
She didn’t just call it out, she screamed it. When she stopped, I said, “What happened?”
“Nothing! Maybe her eyes came open a little bit but they closed up again.”
“Okay,” I said, though okay was far from what I felt. “Okay, Suze, you need to call 911. Do you know how to do that?”
“Yeah but…”
“But what?”
“Mommy said never call 911 if she’s passed out. Because people might come and take me away from her. She said just wait for her to wake up. But there’s more blood this time. Your number was in the phone so I called it instead.”
“That’s good, Suze, that’s smart, but you’re right, this time’s different. Your mommy would want you to call 911. The 911 people know how to help, and they’ll tell you exactly what to do.”
“I’m afraid.” It sounded as if the tears were about to brim over.
“Sure you are, but that’s part of being brave. Even the bravest people get scared. That’s when they ask for help, right?”
“I guess.”
“So I’ll hang up, and then you call 911. Right away, okay? Don’t wait. They’ll stay on the phone with you until everything’s fixed up. After that I’ll call back and check on you. Okay?”
“I guess.”
“Don’t guess, Suze. Just do it.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll hang up now, but I need you to promise to make that call. Do you promise?”
“Yeah.”
“Say it for me.”
“I promise.”
“Good girl.”
I ended the call and looked at the phone in my hand. The phone was shaking. Because my hand was shaking.
Amanda came over and touched my shoulder, and I told her what Suze had said.
She frowned and nodded. “God, that’s awful. It sounds like Rachel’s a cutter.”
“A what?”
“Self-injury. It’s a personality disorder. People cut themselves, burn themselves, things like that. Enough to hurt, but not enough to do real damage. So it probably wasn’t a suicide attempt. You said she had psychiatric drugs in her bathroom?”
Her stash of pharmaceuticals, the kind prescribed for ADHD, OCD, depression, anxiety, even a couple of antipsychotics. Most of them had been prescribed to Rachel, though I had seen a different name on a couple of the labels—Carlos something-or-other, her barroom buddy.
Amanda’s Tau telepathy was acute enough for her to guess what was going through my mind. “You didn’t take advantage of her, Adam. You didn’t know she was crazy until—”
“Until after I took advantage of her.”
“No. You didn’t do anything wrong. Rash, maybe, but not wrong. That’s the thing about outsiders. They’re unpredictable. Not always bad, but dangerous in all kinds of ways, to themselves and others.”
I opened my phone again and tried Rachel’s number. I was gratified that the line was busy. I hoped it meant Suze was doing what I had told her to do.
Amanda said, “Rachel’s damaged in ways you couldn’t have known about. I just don’t want you to be collateral damage.”
“I’m thinking about Suze. Does she count as collateral damage?” I looked at the others in the room, my tribe, all of us leaning on each other in one way or another. Suze didn’t have a tribe. She barely had a mother.
Amanda took a step back and said, “What I mean is—”
I could guess what she was about to say. My welfare was more important to her than Rachel’s. She didn’t want me to get hurt. Outside Tau, people were unpredictable and relationships could go wrong in countless ways. Misunderstandings were inevitable. And so on.
But she didn’t finish the sentence.
At the time—when the window glass shattered, when the drapes billowed as if an invisible finger had tugged them, when Amanda looked startled and then fell down—we didn’t understand what was happening. Later, we reconstructed it this way:
Gordo MacDonald had put his security detail on alert. Marcy Britnell, a Tau from Cleveland and formerly a second lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, was working the tree line at the western edge of the property, armed with a pistol and equipped with a pair of IR goggles, when she spotted a figure in the forest. The figure appeared to be carrying a long gun, and Marcy quietly called the news in to Gordo while keeping the stranger in view.
Gordo didn’t want Marcy tackling the intruder by herself, so he told her to hold her position while he sent out a couple more of his people. And that’s what Marcy did, until she saw the figure raise his weapon and aim it toward the house. At which point she leveled her pistol and shouted to the gunman to lower his weapon and stand down.