“Shut the door,” she ordered. I did so. “Now lock it and sit down.”
She had broken the hibiscus. Her fingers looked bruised from its stain: jaundiced yellow, ulcerous purple. As I stared she flung the flower into my lap.
“They know it was you in the sleeplabs,” she said. “Dr. Silverthorn matched your retina print with the masterfile. How could you have thought you’d get away with it?” She sank onto the bed, her eyes dull with fatigue.
The rain had hung back for several hours. Now it hammered the windows again, its steady tattoo punctuated by the rattle of hailstones.
“I did not mean to kill her.” I smoothed my robe, flicking the broken blossom onto the floor.
She ground the hibiscus beneath her heel, then picked it up and threw it out the window. “Her face,” she said, as if replying to a question. “Like my brother Aidan’s.”
I stared at her blankly.
“When I found him,” she went on, turning to me with glittering eyes. “On the tree.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dr. Harrow.”
Her lips tightened against her teeth when she faced me. A drop of blood welled against her lower lip. I longed to lean forward to taste it, but did not dare. “She was right, you know. You steal our dreams …”
“That’s impossible.” I crossed my arms, shivering a little from the damp breeze. I hesitated. “You told me that is impossible. Unscientific. Unprofessional thinking.”
She smiled, and ran her tongue over her lip to lick away the blood. “Unprofessional? This has all been very unprofessional, Wendy. Didn’t you know that?”
“The tenets of the revised Nuremberg Act state that an Ascendant should not perform upon a subject any research which she would not undergo herself.”
Dr. Harrow shook her head, ran a hand through damp hair. “Is that what you thought it was? Research?”
I shrugged. “I—I don’t know. The boy—your twin?”
“Aidan …” She spread her fingers against the bed’s coverlet, flexed a finger that bore a heavy ring set with cabochons spelling NASNA . “They found out. Instructors. Our father. About us. We were betrayed by another— promising student. Do you understand?”
A flicker of the feeling she had evoked in bed with her brother returned, and I slitted my eyes, tracing it. “Yes,” I whispered. “I think so.”
“It is—” She fumbled for an explanation. “A crime. They separated us. Aidan … They sent him away, to another kind of—place. Tested him.”
She stood and paced to the window, leaned with a hand upon each side so that the rain lashed about her, then turned back to me. “He went mad.
“You see, something happened that night in the woods.” Shaking her head, she pounded the wall with flattened palms. “He was never the same. He had terrible dreams, he couldn’t bear to sleep alone—that was how it started—
“And then they let him come home for a visit, in the spring. He wouldn’t leave his room. We went out one morning, Father and I. And when we returned, I looked for him, he wasn’t there, not in his room, not anywhere …
“I was the one who found him. He had—” Her voice broke and she stared past me to the wall. “Apple blossom in his hair. And his face—”
I thought she would weep; but her expression twisted so that almost I could imagine she laughed to recall it.
“Like hers …”
She drew nearer, until her eyes were very close to mine. I sniffed and moved to the edge of the bed warily: she had dosed herself with hyoscine derived from the herbarium. Her words slurred as she spoke.
“Do you know what happens now, Wendy? More janissaries arrived tonight. They have canceled our term of research. We’re all terminated. A purge. Tomorrow they take over. New personnel. Representatives of the Governors. Specially trained NASNA medics, hand-picked by Margalis Tast’annin.”
She spat the name, then made a clicking noise with her tongue. “And you, Wendy. And Anna, and all the others. Like the geneslaves: toys. Weapons.” She swayed as she leaned toward me. “You especially. They’ll find him, you know—dig him up and use him—”
“Who, Dr. Harrow?” I asked. Sweat pearled on her forehead. She stretched a hand to graze my temples, and I shivered.
“My brother,” she murmured.
“No, Dr. Harrow. The others—who. betrayed you, who—”
“I told you, we were friends,” she cut me off. “Aidan trusted him—”
“Who?”
“Margalis.” Her hand rested on mine now, and I felt her fingers tightening about my wrist.
“And the other—who was the other, the Boy in the Tree?”
Smiling, she drew me toward her. She reached for the NET ’s rig, flicking rain from the colored wires.
“Let’s find out …”
I cried out at her clumsy hookup. A spot of blood welled from her temple and I touched my face, drew away a finger gelled with the fluid she had smeared carelessly from ear to jaw. Then, before I could lie down, she made the switch and I cried out at the dizzy vistas erupting behind my eyes.
Aniline lightning. Faculae stream from synapse to synapse as ptyalin floods my mouth and my head rears instinctively to smash against the headboard. She has not tied me down. The hyoscine lashes into me like a fiery bile and I open my mouth to scream. In the instant before it begins I taste something faint and caustic in the back of her throat and struggle to free myself from her arms. Then I’m gone.
Before me looms a willow tree shivering in a breeze frigid with the shadow of the northern mountains. Sap oozes from a raw flat yellow scar on the trunk above my head, where, two days before, our father had sawed off the damaged limb. It had broken from the weight. When I found him he lay pillowed on a crush of twigs and young leaves and scattered bark, the blossoms in his hair alone unmarked by the fall. One hand lay upon his breast, the Academy ring glittering in the sunlight. Now I stand on tiptoe and stroke the broken willow, bring my finger to my lips and kiss it. I shut my eyes, because they burn so. No tears left to shed: only this terrible dry throbbing, as though my eyes have been etched with sand. The sobs begin again. The wrenching weight in my chest drags me to my knees until I crouch before the tree, bow until my forehead brushes grass trampled by grieving family and friends from the Academy. I groan and try to think of words, imprecations, a curse to rend the light and living from my world so abruptly strangled and still. But I can only moan. My mouth opens upon dirt and shattered granite. My nails claw at the ground as though to wrest from it something besides stony roots and scurrying earwigs. The earth swallows my voice as I force myself to my knees and, sobbing, raise my head to the tree.
It is enough. He has heard me.
Through the shroud of new leaves he peers with lambent eyes. April’s first apple blossoms weave a snowy cloud about his brow. His eyes are huge, the palest purest green i n the cold morning sun. They stare at me unblinking, harsh and bright and implacable as moonlight, as languidly he extends his hand toward mine.
I stagger to my feet, clots of dirt falling from my palms. From the north the wind rises and rattles the willow branches. Behind me a door rattles as well, as my father leans out to call me back to the house. At the sound I start to turn, to break the reverie that binds me to this place, this tree stirred by a tainted wind riven from a bleak and noiseless shore.
And then I stop, where in memory I have stopped a ‘thousand times, and turn back to the tree. For the first time I meet his eyes.
He is waiting, as He has always waited; as He will always wait. At my neck the wind gnaws cold as iron, stirring the collar of my blouse so that already the chill creeps down my chest, to nuzzle there at my breasts and burrow between them. I nod, very slightly, and glance back at the house.