The doctor said, her voice coming from the ceiling as if she were just one more alien, “You’re awake. What do you feel?”
“Headache. Not terrible. What… what happened?”
“Let me ask you some questions first.” She was asked her name, the date, her location, the name of the president—
“Enough!” Marianne said. “I’m fine! What happened?” But she already knew. Hers was the only bed in the quarantine room.
Dr. Potter paid her the compliment of truth. “It was a suicide bomber. He—”
“The others? Evan Blanford?”
“They’re all dead. I’m sorry, Dr. Jenner.”
Evan. Dead.
Seyd Sharma, with his formal, lilting diction. Julia Namechek, engaged to be married. Trevor Lloyd, whom everyone said would win a Nobel someday. Alyssa Rosert, who always remembered what trump was—all dead.
Evan. Dead.
Marianne couldn’t process that, not now. She managed to say, “Tell me. All of it.”
Ann Potter’s face creased with emotion, but she had herself under control. “The bomber was dressed as a security guard. He had the explosive—I haven’t heard yet what it was—in his stomach or rectum, presumably encased to protect it from body fluids. Autopsy showed that the detonator, ceramic so that it got through all our metal detectors, was probably embedded in a tooth, or at least somewhere in his mouth that could be tongued to go off.”
Marianne pictured it. Her stomach twisted.
Dr. Potter continued, “His name was Michael Wendl and he was new but legitimately aboard, a sort of mole, I guess you’d call it. A manifesto was all over the Internet an hour after the explosion and this morning—”
“This morning? How long have I been out?”
“Ten hours. You had only a mild concussion but you were sedated to stitch up head lacerations, which of course we wouldn’t ordinarily do but this was complicated because—”
“I know,” Marianne said, and marveled at the calm in her voice. “I may have been exposed to the spores.”
“You have been exposed, Marianne. Samples were taken. You’re infected.”
Marianne set that aside, too, for the moment. She said, “Tell me about the manifesto. What organization?”
“Nobody has claimed credit. The manifesto was about what you’d expect: Denebs planning to kill everyone on Earth, all that shit. Wendl vetted okay when he was hired, so speculation is that he was a new recruit to their cause. He was from somewhere Upstate and there’s a lot of dissent going on up there. But the thing is, he got it wrong. He was supposed to explode just outside the Deneb section of the Embassy, not the research labs. His organization, whatever it was, knew something about the layout of the Embassy but not enough. Wendl was supposed to be restricted to sub-bay duty. It’s like someone who’d had just a brief tour had told him where to go, but either they remembered wrong or he did.”
Marianne’s spine went cold. Someone who’d had just a brief tour…
“You had some cranial swelling after the concussion, Marianne, but it’s well under control now.”
Elizabeth.
No, not possible. Not thinkable.
“You’re presently on a steroid administered intravenously, which may have some side effects I’d like you to be aware of, including wakefulness and—”
Elizabeth, studying everything during her visit aboard the Embassy: “Can I see more? Or are you lab types kept close to your cages?” “Where do the Denebs live?” “Interesting. It’s pretty close to the high-risk labs.”
“Marianne, are you listening to me?”
Elizabeth, furiously punching the air months ago: “I don’t believe it, not any of it. There are things they aren’t telling us!”
“Marianne?”
Elizabeth, grudgingly doing her duty to protect the aliens but against her own inclinations. Commanding a critical section of the Border Patrol, a member of the joint task force that had access to military-grade weapons. In an ideal position to get an infiltrator aboard the floating island.
“Marianne! Are you listening to me?”
“No,” Marianne said. “I have to talk to Ambassador Smith!”
“Wait, you can’t just—”
Marianne had started to heave herself off the bed, which was ridiculous because she couldn’t leave the quarantine chamber anyway. A figure appeared on the other side of the glass barrier, behind Dr. Potter. The doctor, following Marianne’s gaze, turned, and gasped.
Noah pressed close to the glass. An energy shield shimmered around him. Beneath it he wore a long tunic like Smith’s. His once pale skin now shone coppery under his black hair. But most startling were his eyes: Noah’s eyes, and yet not. Bigger, altered to remove as much of the skin and expose as much of the white as possible. Within that large, alien-sized expanse of white, his irises were still the same color as her own, an un-alien light gray flecked with gold. They shared no genetic link, and yet their eyes reflected each other. Genetic chance.
“Mom,” he said tenderly. “Are you all right?”
“Noah—”
“I came as soon as I heard. I’m sorry it’s been so long. Things have been… happening.”
It was still Noah’s voice, coming through the energy shield and out of the ceiling with no alien inflection, no trill or click. Marianne’s mind refused to work logically. All she could focus on was his voice: He was too old. He would never speak English as anything but a Middle Atlantic American, and he would never speak World without an accent.
“Mom?”
“I’m fine,” she managed.
“I’m so sorry to hear about Evan.”
She clasped her hands tightly together on top of the hospital blanket. “You’re going. With the aliens. When they leave Earth.”
“Yes.”
One simple word. No more than that, and Marianne’s son became an extraterrestrial. She knew that Noah was not doing this in order to save his life. Or hers, or anyone’s. She didn’t know why he had done it. As a child, Noah had been fascinated by superheroes, aliens, robots, even of the more ridiculous kind where the science made zero sense. Comic books, movies, TV shows—he would sit transfixed for hours by some improbable human transformed into a spider or a hulk or a sentient hunk of metal. Did Noah remember that childish fascination? She didn’t understand what this adopted child, this beloved boy she had not borne, remembered or thought or desired. She never had.
He said, “I’m sorry.”
She said, “Don’t be,” and neither of them knew exactly what he was apologizing for in the first place, nor what she was excusing him from. After that, Marianne could find nothing else to say. Of the thousands of things she could have said to Noah, absolutely none of them rose to her lips. So finally she nodded.
Noah blew her a kiss. Marianne did not watch him go. She couldn’t have borne it. Instead she shifted her weight on the bed and got out of it, holding on to the bedstead, ignoring Ann Potter’s strenuous objections on the other side of the glass.
She had to see Ambassador Smith, to tell him her suspicions about Elizabeth. The terrorist organization could strike again.
As soon as she told Smith, Elizabeth would be arrested. Two children lost—
No, don’t think of it. Tell Smith.
But—Wait. Maybe it hadn’t been Elizabeth. Surely others had had an unauthorized tour of the ship? And now, as a result of the attack, security would be tightened. Probably no other saboteur could get through. Perhaps there would be no more supply runs by submarine, no more helicopters coming and going on the wide pier. Time was so short—maybe there were enough supplies aboard already. And perhaps the Denebs would use their unknowable technology to keep the Embassy safer until the spore cloud hit, by which time of course the aliens would have left. There were only three months left. Surely a second attack inside the Embassy couldn’t be organized in such a brief time! Maybe there was no need to name Elizabeth at all.