Idols Page 17

  “This is okay?” Bibi looks up from where he’s picking bits of broken glass out of a gash on Ro’s arm.

  “Relatively speaking,” I say.

  Lucas is taping up the fingers on his right hand himself. The clean classroom robes make him look like one of Bibi’s boys. “Fortis is right. We have to be more careful.”

  Lucas looks at me. I take the tape from his hand, ripping it free, tucking in the loose ends.

  “I’m fine. We’re fine,” I say, but I can feel Ro’s eyes on me.

  I don’t look at him.

  “You rest up, and we’ll go pay a little visit to the monks tomorrow. Then, one way or another, we’re out of here. I’m not waitin’ around for the GAP to blow our heads off. Not while the GAP’s head is still sittin’ pretty on his own neck.”

  I shoot Fortis a look, but he says nothing more.

  “Tomorrow, then,” I say.

  “Tomorrow,” Bibi agrees.

  After that, even the silence sounds threatening.

  One by one, the others have retired inside. Tima is helping Bibi in the classroom, while Fortis has gone off, mumbling about some sort of search for ancient maps.

  Lucas and I are the last ones left out in the heat of the garden, when I notice Fortis’s jacket lying on the rocks.

  I pick it up.

  It must have been too warm to wear.

  It’s heavy, and I realize the book must still be inside. I hesitate.

  “What are you doing?” Lucas watches as I pull out the cloth-wrapped book. He’s right next to me, close and warm. I feel as safe as I can feel—with my throbbing head and my battered leg.

  “Something I should have done a long time ago,” I say.

  I pull myself to my feet, holding my hand out to Lucas. “Come on.”

  We slip through the crowded classroom and out the door before anyone can say a word. Tima doesn’t even look up from an old carved abacus.

  We keep our heads down and the book hidden from sight between us.

  The heat almost knocks me over within the first few steps out into the sunlight, but I don’t stop, and neither does Lucas.

  We don’t even look at each other until we reach the end of the muddy canal and turn the corner out onto the broad, busy boulevard.

  “There’s nowhere we can go.” I turn in every direction, but it’s all the same. People and tuk-tuks and animals, as far as the eye can see.

  “For what?” Lucas slides his hand onto my shoulder, and I can feel from his touch that he’s as relieved to be out of the Educated Pig as I am.

  “To find a place where we can be alone,” I say, weighing the book in my hand. “Before anyone notices that we’re gone.”

  “Alone? I like the sound of that. But I guess it’s hard to find, especially in an island colony.” Lucas looks down the streets past me.

  Then I feel his hand squeezing my shoulder. “Found it. Come on.”

  “You don’t spend your childhood as the Ambassador’s son and not pick up a few tricks,” Lucas says.

  We’ve wedged ourselves onto a muddy bank of weeds beneath a boat mooring, a tiny slip of land jutting out between two run-down apartment buildings. Only a ledge of jagged concrete hides us from the busy street behind us—but the wooden dock over our heads is protection enough.

  Our view of the bay and the curving coast beyond it, on the other hand, is sweeping and bright.

  Almost idyllic.

  If you didn’t know.

  My feet dig into the dirt beneath me, and I feel the edge of the water seeping into my sarong.

  No one can see us now.

  Lucas pulls me close in the warm shade, and I feel his breath along my bare shoulder. “Now that we’re alone,” he whispers, lowering his head toward mine, “what did you want to do?” He smiles at me—until I hold up the worn, frayed book.

  “This.”

  His face falls as I pull it open—and we begin to read.

  THE ICON CHILDREN–SEA COLONIES LAB DATA–WEEK 42

  SPECIMEN ONE: RNA INTERFERENCE MINIMAL. FURTHER STUDY OF PROTEIN EXPRESSION REQUIRED.

  NOTE: I MYSELF WILL TRACK THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THIS SPECIMEN.

  SPECIMEN TWO: GENE TRANSFER. GENOME SEQUENCING TRACKING AS PER CUSTOMARY NORMS.

  NOTE: WILLIAM IS SUPERVISING.

  SPECIMEN THREE: NUCLEIC ACID A FACTOR. BIOINFORMATION DATA TO FOLLOW.

  NOTE: HAVE ASKED YANG TO RUN SAMPLES. EARLY RESULTS COULD BE AVAILABLE AS EARLY AS NEXT WEEK.

  SPECIMEN FOUR: EPIGENETIC ANALYSIS UNDER WAY.

  NOTE: ELA WILL CONFIRM.

  NOTE: FOR THE FIRST TIME, I MYSELF FEEL SOMETHING CLOSE TO HUMAN. THE IRONY IS NOT LOST ON ME.

  “Something close to human? What does that mean?”

  I look up. Lucas is still reading over my shoulder. “And Ela? Who is that?” He sounds as confused as I am.

  I put the journal down. For the first time, I see that small, gold-flecked letters are embossed in the corner of the front cover. It looks like an E, or maybe an L. And then, more clearly, an A.

  Not an F.

  I wonder how Fortis came to have this book in his possession. Before the Padre.

  I look up at Lucas. “Fortis is—a complicated human.” I don’t know how else to say it. I don’t know what else to think.

  “Not the kind of human you’d leave to settle the fate of the world?”

  “Not so much. No.” I weigh the book in my hands. “I mean, this is all my fault, isn’t it? I’m the one who brought him to us. Maybe we were wrong to trust him. Maybe I was.”

  Lucas moves his hand to my hair, tucking a loose strand of dark curl behind my ear.

  “Dol. This isn’t your fault. Any of it.”

  His thumb traces the edge of my jaw, moving down to the base of my neck.

  He reaches back, taking a handful of spindly blossoms from the blooming bank of weeds next to us, tossing them into the air. Red flower petals, red as rubies, red as kisses, fall across me.

  He pulls his mouth to mine, so slowly it seems he is savoring every bit of air between us. My own breath is caught in my throat.

  And then I’m caught.

  I’m caught and I’m his, I think.

  This isn’t about Ro. Not anymore.

  I’m not about Ro anymore.

  The scent of the blossoms is heavy in the warm afternoon, as heavy as his kiss, as heavy as the fire that still burns between us. I wish I could stop. I wish I wanted to stop. I know, logically, that there is more to read in the book, before Fortis finds us. Now is my best chance. Our best chance.

  But I don’t.

  I can’t.

  I can’t stop myself and I don’t want to.

  You have to choose, I think. You have chosen, I think.

  Choose Lucas.

  Slowly, I pull the tie on my binding.

  We’ve never finished this. And I want to be with him. To bind with him.

  I want to feel like I am more than one person. I want my heart to feel warm again.

  I don’t want to end up as gray powder on the floor of the hawker center.

  I don’t want to be ash. Not before this. Not before now.

  Some things never change.

  I learned that long ago. Everything else does.

  That much I learned today.

  My binding drops.

  I lower the book into the dirt next to me and turn to Lucas, holding out my bare wrist.

  “Lucas.”

  He looks at me, and his eyes are somehow different, dark and full. He knows what I’m thinking. He knows what we’re doing.

  What this is.

  “I—”

  I don’t know what to say.

  I’ve been waiting for so long. I don’t want to wait anymore.

  “Dol.” He pulls me toward him, slowly, unbuttoning his leather cuff. It falls to the ground next to the curls of my abandoned cloth binding.

  Skin on skin in the damp heat of the afternoon.

  In the bank of weeds beneath th
e dock.

  I lace my fingers through his and we press our hands together, flattening our palms.

  Slowly, I lower my wrist to his.

  Dot to dot.

  Love to Sorrow.

  Lucas to me.

  The shiver that begins in his body echoes down the length of mine. My hand starts to shake uncontrollably, and I want to cry—but I don’t know why.

  My heart pounds and my heart hurts and every moment is terrifying and every moment is bliss.

  All this from his hand in mine.

  The warmth that is Lucas flows through me and I take it. I offer back my own stillness, my peace. I give him the thing that I am. My calm, cool gray to his gold.

  There in the weeds along the water’s edge, we become something so much larger than what we are alone.

  There is love and there is sadness and there is not one without the other. Not for us.

  We are one story now, and we are true.

  One true thing.

  He buries his face in my neck. There, he says. There, I answer back.

  When everything is over and we have fallen back into ourselves, I kiss him on the mouth.

  Then he pulls me to him, and I curl into his side.

  “That was—that was—”

  I lie on my side, looking over at him.

  “Yes,” I say. “It was.” Then I reach up and kiss him softly on the cheek. “And so are you.”

  We lie like that, sleeping on the shore for hours, until the sun sinks and the busy streets quiet behind us.

  So this is love, I think.

  This is Lucas, inside and out, with me.

  Let the gray ash come now.

  Do what you will, Lords. I am bound to something bigger than myself.

  My heart is no longer alone and you can’t kill that.

  Not even you.

  By the time I notice the dock is on fire, the streets are filled with Colonists trying to help. As we scramble out from beneath the wooden pilings, I hold my sarong tight. I blush as I slip past the anxious-looking men, who dump bucket after bucket of water on the flames.

  “You know what this is, don’t you?” Lucas doesn’t look me in the eye when he says it. “Who?”

  I do.

  There’s only one person who would care so much about me kissing Lucas that his even seeing it would set this dock on fire.

  Perhaps we weren’t as discreet as we thought.

  We turn the corner to the dirty canal, leaving the fire still uncontained.

  Just as I slip the book into Fortis’s warm jacket, the school’s gong announces dinner.

  Fortis and Bibi are so preoccupied with a set of ancient scrolls—maps, held in place with silken cords, red and gold—that they don’t come out to join us.

  It’s a good thing, too, because my sarong is muddy and wet and smells like smoke, and Fortis might have noticed.

  I only know because Ro makes a point of telling me.

  Ro notices everything. This is not new information. Neither are his feelings about me—about me, and my own feelings.

  I know Ro sees it all, the way Lucas stays at my side, now more than ever. The way our arms graze against each other when we walk down the hall, the way my hand finds a way to touch him, as if there were a reason.

  The way our eyes meet and our cheeks flush and the pull Lucas has over me—over everyone—is now no more than the pull I have over him.

  Love.

  That’s what Ro sees.

  That’s what there is.

  It breaks my heart, but I know it breaks his more. Which is why the sky still smells like smoke, even now.

  SPECIAL EMBASSY DISPATCH TO GAP MIYAZAWA

  MARKED URGENT

  MARKED EYES ONLY

  Note: Contact Jasmine3k, Virt. Hybrid Human 39261.SEA, Laboratory Assistant to Dr. E. Yang, for future commentary, as necessary.

  FORTIS ==> DOC

  Transcript - ComLog 04.02.2067

  //comlog begin;

  FORTIS: Do you think there’s any chance NULL is biological?;

  DOC: Unlikely but difficult to confirm.;

  FORTIS: Hmmm… Well, think about how we might find that out. It could be an angle, either way.;

  DOC: Agreed.;

  FORTIS: And if you have spare cycles, keep working on possible ways to stall NULL. Confuse, hack, hijack. Anything to buy us more time before they get here and send us off to join the dodo.;

  DOC: Dodos are fascinating. Extinct, but fascinating.;

  FORTIS: You know what was wrong with the dodo? It didn’t know to be afraid of predators. I won’t make that same mistake, DOC.;

  DOC: So noted.;

  //comlog end;

  24

  WAT PHRA KAEW

  “We should be walking,” says Fortis. I can see him glower, even in the early-morning light.

  “You mean, we should be sleeping,” yawns Ro, from the back of the tuk-tuk.

  “We should be more careful about drawing attention to ourselves,” Fortis says. The water buffalo in front of him—one pinkish white, one black—stumble in the empty, uneven street, as if they agree.

  “The sun is only just rising. There is no attention to draw,” Bibi points out. Lucas and Tima, wedged on either side of Bibi’s enormous yellow robes, look like they would rather be walking themselves.

  Fortis rolls his eyes. “I’m surprised the water buffalo can even still pull you, William. Perhaps you should lay off the coconut milk curries.”

  “And perhaps you need a little sweetening up, my friend.” The tuk-tuk careens to one side, and Bibi smiles. “There it is.”

  There, surrounded by an enormous wall, is a complex of the most beautiful and elaborate buildings I have ever seen. Intricately carved rooftops form into peaks, golden spires rising into the sky between them. “Those are stupas,” Bibi says, pointing to the golden, spiked towers. “Very beautiful. Which means we’re at the Grand Palace. Where we find the Wat.” Bibi nods. “Wat Phra Kaew.”

  “Wat what?” Ro asks.

  “The Temple of the Emerald Buddha.”

  “Emerald meaning the color, not the stone,” Fortis says. “In other words, green. Green like jade, or like your jade girl. It’s a start.” He winks at me and I feel for the carved jade shapes in my chestpack.

  The Temple of the Emerald Buddha. To find the jade girl.

  Could she really be so close now?

  The streets don’t stay empty long, not even as long as the sunrise. As soon as we near the temple, the crush of people in the streets outside the walls of the Grand Palace is amazing. Even now, all around me the morning heat presses in—the heat, the people, and every thought or feeling they have. I am overwhelmed. Desperation and longing fill the air around me, closing in. I hear the pleading minds: “My son is ill, please heal him.” “My mother is missing, please bring her back.” The crowd has come to make their offerings, to ask blessings of Buddha—and they create a whirlwind in my mind.

  Then I hear a voice behind me. “Breathe, little one.” It’s Bibi. “Their pain is not your pain,” he says. “Say it. Build the wall. Their pain is not your pain. Not today.”

  I breathe and concentrate.

  Not today. Not me.

  I remember, and I calm down. At least, a little.

  In front of me, a small child holds a stack of cages packed full of tiny mice, her hand outstretched.

  “What’s that?” I gesture to the child, and as I do, I hear Tima suck in her breath behind me.

  “Karma.” Bibi shrugs. “Some believe it is good luck to free a caged creature. So others cage them, to sell the chance to free them.”

  “Isn’t that cheating?” I look up at him.

  “Not for the mice.” He shrugs again.

  I wonder. Is that how the Lords see us?

  Ro snorts, and Lucas says nothing. Tima is heartbroken, pulling her pockets inside out, searching for anything of value.

  Before Tima can say a word, Lucas is pressing a handful of digs into the little girl’s
hand.

  “I’ll take them all.”

  With a flick of his hand, it’s done.

  Mice burst out from the small wooden boxes, flooding into all corners of the temple.

  I don’t know who’s happier—the mice or Tima. She takes Lucas by the hand, gratefully.

  Lucas smiles at her, rubbing her head with his free hand. They’ve been together a long time, I think.

  They’re something old. We’re something new. Not everything changes.

  Not everything should.

  A woman interrupts the scene and thrusts a handful of necklaces at me. “You buy. You buy. Good luck. Two hundred dig.” I shake my head, but when I look at the necklaces, I see a teardrop-shaped piece of clear glass, with a tiny green figure inside.

  It’s him. The same. The jade Buddha. The chess piece belonging to the jade girl, the one I see on the chessboard, in my dreams. Same as the one the Bishop gave me.

  Is this the Emerald Buddha?

  Has it been him, all along?

  If so, then I really am here. This must be the right place.

  Are you here, jade girl? I look around, but all I see and hear and feel is the crush of the crowd.

  If she’s here, I can’t feel her.

  As the crowd carries us under the arched entrance to the palace walls, I hear distant chanting that I do not understand.

  Bibi hands a few digs to a woman working at a table. In return, he grabs an armful of pale green blossoms, as round as closed bulbs, or fists. Tied to their stems are sticks of incense and bright yellow candles, one for each of us. “Lotus,” says Bibi. “We make an offering to the Lord Buddha. Come,” he says, grabbing my hand and placing it on his sleeve. “You hold on to me.”

  We thread our way through the crowd until we reach urns of water, surrounded by people pressing to get near. The closer we get to the urns, the more difficult it is to stay together. The crowd pushes against us on all sides, until we float away from each other like small boats on different ocean waves.

  Hands outstretched in every direction press the blossoms toward the water, into the water. The woman next to me presses the flower against her forehead. An older woman fills an empty bottle with water.