TWENTY-SIX

WE’RE FIVE DAYS out. Ted’s below deck, and it doesn’t look good. His breathing is ragged and shallow—when he’s even breathing at all. His skin is paper-white, past pale. Like the life’s being drained out of it. His hair’s turning yellow and brittle at the edges and crumbling up and away and off. When Stan goes down to see him, everyone else leaves, even the Icelings. Like they know. I try to look at him, but he doesn’t want to look at me. Not now, anyway.

Stan is working with an average of maybe four hours of sleep a night. And that’s spaced out throughout the night, too, in increments of fifteen to thirty minutes. He doesn’t want us to get off-course, and he still won’t teach anyone how to do anything without him. But Emily and I just let him. There’s nothing else we can do. I think he’s putting everything he has into this, into having a skill that might be able to get us somewhere. I think it’s all he can think to do, all he can do, right now. He needs to be needed. He needs to feel he has a purpose. He needs to keep going.

But at some point he’s going to need to stop running. The body gives up. I’m so worried about him. And there’s still so much to try to think about, to try to figure out.

Emily and I do what we can to look after Ted, but really it’s Callie and Greta and Tara’s thing. All we can really do is check on things, just look at our sisters and try to see what’s in their eyes.

IT’S EARLY MORNING. The sun’s just starting to think about dragging itself out of bed. Callie’s up here with me, and I’m trying to figure out where we’re supposed to go.

But mostly what I’ve spent my time figuring out is this: Callie, my sister, is a plant person. I mean that she was brought into this world by a plant that rose up from a trembling field of ice, and she was plucked from the pod of that plant by my father and brought home to me.

Or that’s my guess. But everything he said, about the ground shaking, then going still, about the sky smelling like lightning, the clouds low and heavy and with a mind of their own, opening a hole in the sky to let the light in . . .

He didn’t know what he was doing, I tell myself. I hope to myself. I hope so hard that he didn’t know that he was stealing—kidnapping—dozens of infants, robbing them of their home, their families, the lives they were supposed to lead. And maybe he didn’t mean to. Maybe he really thought he was saving them. But even if he thought he was somehow helping them, saving them, I still have got to wonder: Why would he take them away from their home? Their habitat, the place that literally nurtures them. They came out of the ground. In pods. What would make him think that they’d belong somewhere else? That they’d survive somewhere else? Was it because of me? Did he take them because of me? Did he miss me so much that when he saw Callie, a perfect alien baby, his parental instincts just went haywire and took over? Did something go wrong with the pods, and was it his fault, and was he afraid for their safety? Did something go wrong and it wasn’t his fault? Did he understand at all what he’d done? And if he did, and if he took them all away more out of love than anything else, would that even start to make it okay? Or was that his mission all along?

And then I always come back to the fact that if he hadn’t done what he did, I wouldn’t have Callie. And right now, I don’t even know how to ask if that would have been a good thing or a bad thing. For either of us. And I especially don’t know how to think about the more likely and infinitely more gut-punching possibility: that Dad never bringing Callie home would have been a bad thing for me but a good thing for Callie. Everything is so wrapped up in itself right now, I don’t have a clue what to think. I mean that just . . . I mean that if I was going to sit here and wonder what would have happened if none of this had happened, then I wouldn’t be of any use to anyone.

And then there is this: What if Callie’s an alien? And what if she’s not the nice kind of alien? Or what if she’s not an alien but just a plant-based fluke from the middle of the earth who can withstand extreme climates and who looks like a human but isn’t? What if Callie is dangerous? What if Callie doesn’t really love me at all? Not because she hates me or wants to harm me, but because she can’t? Love me or hate me, she just can’t?

But you know what? So what? Who cares? What I know for sure is that in this life, Callie is my sister, and I want to help. She’s my sister. And I want to help. I have to help. Right?

But in the tired, calm quiet that has settled in on this boat, as we sail our way across the sea, the realizations of the day keep flooding in, crashing and re-crashing like a recycled wave. My sister, my sister, is a plant person. Or, more specifically: My sister is a plant. Who looks like a person. Who came out of a pod. That rose up out of the earth in a trembling field of ice. And then I think about it some more, and then I look at Callie, still the sweet-seeming and sometimes-quiet, sometimes-giddy girl I grew up with, and I try to feel startled and shocked and like the world as I know it has been changed and ruined forever, but then I kind of have to laugh at myself, because of course she’s a plant person! And I’m the dummy who didn’t see it before! She’s always had a thing for being close to the ground, has always needed to sleep on the floor, sit on the floor, touch the ground and the soil. And when she walks, it’s like she needs to be as near to the ground as possible. She needs to be able to touch it, if she has to. This deliberate, low-armed, shifting gait.

And it’s even right there in the official ARO literature! All AROs are required to be near to and have access to a garden or greenhouse. Required! And she loves the sun, loves rainstorms and showers and sprinklers and Super Soaker fights, and she hates taking baths, just refuses to do it. And her crazy diet, and her naps by the window, and her sluggishness during spans when the sun hides behind the clouds. And the way she practically glows when she’s healthy and happy, but when she’s sad or going through a rough time where we’re always back and forth between home and the hospital, she looks so miserable, so physically wilted and worn, that I feel like I’d do anything—something dangerous, violent, unthinkable—just to be able to climb inside her mind and ask her what’s wrong in a language she understands.

My sister is a plant person. Who was stolen from the only place on earth where she knew how to belong. By my father, a scientist, who—I hope—thought he was doing her a favor by taking her away from the weird, silent winds and the snow-cradling trees and the rocky hills and cliffs and putting her in the suburbs, in a house that was warm and dry and safe, with cable TV and microwave ovens and telephones to connect her to anyone in the world except the only ones she wants.

And then I remember that . . . guy. That Iceling who looked like their leader, who was there to greet our Icelings in the Arctic, who disappeared underground, who might have survived the genocide. Where the hell has he been these past sixteen years? There was no way for me to tell how old he is or what kind of Iceling he is, but whether he’s very old and was around when my dad was there or was one of the babies in Callie’s . . . crop who somehow managed to hide and cling to the Arctic when the others were taken, why the hell didn’t he do anything? Because whether he was already there when Callie was born or was born at the same time as Callie, it means the same thing: Someone survived. And if he couldn’t find a way to rescue Callie and the others earlier, then why did he let it happen again? Why did he allow them to die? Why wasn’t he prepared?

But Callie is the plant person, not me, which has been the problem all along and which is the reason why it’s stupid for me to be asking these questions, because there’s no way for me to know. Callie might know. There’s no telling all the things she knows that I can’t know because of my human limitations, because I am limited to merely five out of the probably infinite number of senses there are in this universe.

But there’s one thought during this exhausting and trauma-fueled loop I’m on that I keep coming back to, the one that keeps rearing around and triggering me back to the start all over again. And that thought is represented by one stark, horrifying image, the same image I would use in the encyclopedia entry for this completely surreal experience: the pods. The crumbling, shriveled-up pods that were dead before the government could kill them. If that Iceling, the leader, the one who was already there . . . if he survived . . . if he had at least sixteen years to plan for the next trembling field, the next gen eration of pod people . . . then why would he mess it up so badly? Why wouldn’t he do everything to make sure the island—the field, at the very least—was protected? Bulletproof. That the island was uninhabitable by anyone who was not born from a pod?

But more importantly, why were the pods empty? Why were they already dead?

Were they dead on purpose? Was that the whole point? Were they meant to draw the military here, draw its fire? Was the island supposed to burn? And if the answer to any of these questions is yes, then who was in on it? Was Callie? Her brothers and sisters? Or was it just that one Iceling, the one who disappeared into the ground?

Whoever planned it, maybe they knew, or at least thought, that whoever took the babies was one day going to come back? Maybe they figured they’d make sure that what happened there, what happened to Callie and Ted and Greta and Tara, would never happen again? I know this is crazy. I know I’m trying to solve a mystery that may as well have happened on another planet, in another time period, to a bunch of characters in a TV show aired in another dimension, one that was cancelled before fans could get any answers. But I can’t help but wonder if maybe an Iceling—or all the Icelings—rigged this whole entire thing to happen exactly as it did, because they felt like it would be better if everyone thought they were dead. Because I have to think that if I were in Callie’s shoes, or in the shoes of an Iceling who was left behind, all alone, while his family was stolen from him and taken somewhere hostile . . . I wouldn’t trust anyone ever again. I would want to disappear, to make everyone think I was dead and gone so that they could never hurt me or anyone I loved again, because in their eyes there wouldn’t be anyone to hurt.

I look over at Callie. I think as hard as I can about everything she’s been through. I think about her whole life, as far as I’m equipped to imagine it, and then I kick myself for thinking I could even begin to do that. For the sheer vanity, the fucking arrogance of thinking that I could ever even attempt to speak for a person whom I have never heard speak, and who has never acknowledged in any definitive way the words that I speak. That I could presume to know how she looks at the world and feels about anyone, especially me. And for the first time, I don’t feel sad because there’s no way to know if she feels anything at all about or for me. Instead, I feel guilty and foolish for never choosing to look at Callie or our relationship in any way besides the one that fits with my world, the one that Callie can’t be a part of.

I close my eyes. I see Callie smiling at me and shoving a Ritz cracker in her mouth. And I see her braiding flowers into my hair and my hair into a crown before every first day of school until I was twelve, when I picked her hands up and put them down at her sides and just left her there, because the girls at school were brutal, and wearing your hair down was the thing. And I see her weaving crowns of grass the other week, and sitting in my empty car for days on end, waiting for me to take her somewhere I didn’t even understand it was possible to go to. And I can see her smiling! And I can remember her being scared about going to school, and I can remember when she didn’t go back to school, when Jane determined there were better ways to socialize and educate, and I can remember not knowing how scared I should have been, how I was just hurt everyone thought Callie was so different. And I can see her throwing her whole room into a suitcase, a look of determined panic on her face, and I see her hands building an island, building her home. I see her sitting in my empty car, day after day, waiting for me to take her somewhere I didn’t even understand it was possible to go. And then I see her watching that place, her home, burn to the ground. And I remember when we took baths together when we were really little, and Callie was so confused and terrified by the water, and me, at four years old, holding her hand, patting the water, wanting to show her it was okay, that even if some thing was scary to her it was all still going to be okay, and taking her hand to pat it, and we patted the water, and it was okay, it was, at that moment I felt it was okay, that I had made her feel okay, but it’s not until now that I see that okay for me and okay for Callie have never been the same thing.

I can hear Emily waking up. Stan checking the motor. I know that Callie’s lying on her back over to my right, in the morning sun. I know the wind’s coming from the aft and blowing a bit toward starboard. I know the water’s a little choppy, but that’s how it gets sometimes.

I close my eyes, and when I open them, what I see is the sea. And a clear sky. And when I turn my head, there’s the sun, and I let it warm my whole face. And what I know right now is exactly what I’ve always known: Callie is my sister, and I love her. But I know something new now too. I know I would die for her. I would. I know that I don’t particularly want to die but that I would die for her. And I’m crying. I touch her face, just to touch it, just to . . . I want to tell her that I’m here for her. I want to tell her that I’ll always be here for her, and that I love her so much, and I want to tell her that I don’t know how to tell her this. So I touch her face, and she lets me, and that’s all either of us can say right now. And if I told you it was enough, I’d be a liar.