It’s far after curfew, but Darius doesn’t care. He sits in the back seat of Noah’s car, ducked all the way down and out of people’s sight. Noah sits in the front seat, pretending to read his Zalmon newspaper.
Darius is on the phone with Mahlah, who is all alone at home, oblivious to everything that happened but irate.
“Darius? Where are you? And where is Mom?”
Darius swallows hard. “I don’t know. She’s Datura. She could be anywhere.”
“She’s never done this before.”
“Don’t worry about her. Worry about yourself.” Darius can’t bring himself to tell Mahlah the truth. How could he without devastating her? But what should he tell her instead? That their mother Left? That would be equally as traumatic to a young girl who believes in Zalmon, and just another lie on top of lies.
Instead of telling her, Darius changes the subject.
“Are you okay with those needles?”
Mahlah refuses to answer.
“Are you okay?” Darius repeats. “With those needles?”
Mahlah hangs up.
Just as she does, there is a knock at her front door.
Mahlah makes her way downstairs and looks through the peephole. To her shock, it’s Priya. Mahlah unlocks the door to let her in.
Priya is out of breath.
“Darius isn’t here,” Mahlah tells her.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you okay?” Priya softens, thinking that not only is this poor kid in recovery, she just lost her mother and must be in agony.
“Are you okay?” Mahlah mirrors the sentiment, although for different reasons. She’s never seen Priya look this distraught, and Mahlah fears it’s her fault on account of last night’s episode, which she vaguely recollects the beginning of.
Priya wipes tears from her eyes.
“My brother has a real habit of making girls cry.”
“It’s not that. It’s just … you’ve been through so, so much this past while, and me? You ask about me? You’re the sweetest, honestly.”
Mahlah shrugs. She feels much better, whatever it was. Or is. She wonders why Priya is making such a fuss over her.
“Do you mind if I come in and stay here?” Priya asks. “I really don’t think you should be by yourself.”
“Don’t worry. They’ll come home soon,” Mahlah says. She’s nervous about the socialization rules. There’s no valid reason for Priya to be in their home.
Priya notes the they’ll. She gasps. Mahlah doesn’t know about her mother.
Priya won’t budge. Mahlah, tired of the standoff, lets her in.
Aysa, Noah, and Darius stare at Sela’s corpse in the middle of the room — each is having a different reaction.
Noah wonders how the people who loved her are doing, if she died filled with happiness or if living as a Datura voided the good memories from her existence. He can relate to her diseased years, in a sense. He is more robotic than the average man on account of having little to live for. What is a man if not a loved one, or a provider, or a leader? Noah has never known anything different; he was born with rare skin twenty shades darker than most, and as a curious and observant citizen of Zalmon, he knows he got the raw end of the deal. Even in the Underground … Sure he’s been linked to women romantically, but just in an experimental way — like he’s a notch on their belts. Aboveground, he’s not permitted to fall in love, and underground, he’s not taken seriously.
Aysa looks at Sela’s cadaver as an opportunity. Back when he was a contributing member in Medical Training, they had dummies to work on, of course, but the rubber mannequins didn’t do things justice. Here, Aysa can see how cold Sela is. How her fingertips have blued. How her cheeks have grayed. There is nothing sentimental about it to him. Medicine is Aysa’s calling. Aboveground, he did it and did it well, but the life was getting to him. He knew he was being overlooked during promotion periods. He was always on Annual Check duty and was never able to reach his full potential — never called up to the big leagues. Anonymous notes in his locker warned him that he asked “too many questions.” But how does a person learn if they don’t ask questions? It took years to convince his Life Match to escape to the Underground, but he managed. Now she seeks the company of others more than she ever did him, and it doesn’t bother him in the least. Aysa isn’t sure why — there’s no medical reasoning and no mention of it in the Book — but he’s always felt a pull to his same sex. He is attracted to some of the men in his life on a level he can’t, and never will, articulate, so the facade with his Life Match works. They’re together but not.
For some reason, when Darius looks at Sela now, he’s taken back to his childhood. Why, after the death of a loved one, do we recall the good times over the bad? For the past five years, Sela has been completely Datura as if following a strict manual. But prior to that, his mother was warm, loving, nurturing, energetic, and fun. She had a lust for life that was contagious. While her two children were toddlers, she would scoop them up and cuddle them for as long as they could stand it. And the love she extended to her Life Match? Undeniable passion, faithfulness, and loyalty. There was nothing Darius’s father could do to upset her. She had unparalleled patience and bottomless forgiveness. Darius wants nothing more right now than to tell his mother how she made him feel during the early years of his life, and that he will carry those days with him. Above all else, he wants to tell her he’s sorry for being such a shitty son, for not being the kind of person she raised him to be, for questioning her at every turn, and for misunderstanding her intentions.
He should have known.
“I don’t have the equipment to burn her,” Aysa says.
“Burn her?” Darius is disgusted.
“I think that’s what’s done with dead bodies.”
“Have respect, Aysa,” Noah says, moving between them. “Darius, from what we’ve read, it’s customary for a human to be cremated — it means their solid state is transformed into vapor and ashes. Their energy is released into our world. That way, they’re never really gone. Isn’t that right, Aysa?”
“Just like I said. Burn her.”
After some thought, Darius asks, “But you don’t have the right equipment?”
“It’s not hygienic to do it in our pits, otherwise I would,” Aysa says.
“We could bury her,” Noah suggests.
Darius and Aysa turn to him like he’s insane.
“Absolutely not,” says Darius.
“Hear me out. The idea behind cremation is to have her essence released into air molecules. But if we bury her under the Underground, then …”
Aysa gets into it now. “Then her” — he side-eyes Noah — “essence will filter through the clay and soil, leading all the way to the real trees. And I suppose parts of her will always be in the leaves.”
“And beyond.” Noah smiles.
Darius thinks about it for a long while. “Let’s bury her,” he decides.