Skye ate. Never in her life had she felt so constantly hungry. Never before had she consumed so much food. Her body used the calories for repairing and rebuilding her tissues. Day by day she gradually regained the weight she had lost, until once again she was sleek with muscle overlaid by a thin and healthy cushion of fat.
Only then did the doctors consent to let her out of the monkey house.
It was late at night, past midnight when she left. Skye couldn’t understand why the docs had picked such an hour.
Yulyssa met her. There was no one else around. A transit car brought them home. All was quiet until they entered the courtyard of their apartment building, then they were set upon by a flock of camera bees. The buzzing machines swooped out from behind the shrubbery that flanked the building’s entrance, startling Skye so badly she hissed and ducked away.
Yulyssa stood her ground. She glared at the camera bees, warning their operators in a voice that was deadly cold, “Leave now. We have nothing to say.”
City law required they obey, or face harassment charges. The bees retreated, but they did not really leave. Skye could hear them buzzing within the shrubbery. “They want to talk to me, don’t they?” she asked softly.
“Tomorrow,” Yulyssa said, and they went inside.
In the morning the bees were gone, but only because Yulyssa had negotiated a media contract that required Skye to answer questions at an open press conference. The mediots were satisfied.
Siva Hand was not.
As Skye stepped outside, she was startled to discover Devi’s mother waiting in the courtyard. Devi himself was not in sight.
Siva was dressed formally, with wide, stiff sleeves and deeply pleated pants. She stood with her back very straight. On her face was a look of impatient anger. One glance at Siva, and Skye felt as if she were late for a forgotten appointment. Nervously, she stroked Ord’s tentacle as it curled gently around her neck.
The little robot had chosen to ride on her shoulder this morning. Now it murmured in her ear, “Scary lady, Skye. Go back. Go home. Yulyssa will help, yes? Please Skye?”
“Hush, Ord.” Skye had to make this press conference. It would be her last good chance to persuade the city that she was not just some reckless kid. She couldn’t turn back because Siva Hand stood in her way.
Of course she did not want a fight. So she decided to play dumb.
“M. Hand,” she said, nodding her head in polite greeting. “You must have come to see Yulyssa. Do go on up. I know she’d love to receive you.” And with that she tried to hurry past this woman who had lost her first family to a Chenzeme assault centuries before.
Something in Siva’s icy voice made her stop. “Young lady, you know very well it’s you I’ve come to see.” This was not the same voice Siva had used that night Skye first met Devi. Then, Siva had seemed sweetly endearing. Now . . .
In her voice, Devi’s mother carried the gravity of all the sad centuries she had been alive. Skye could not run from that voice anymore than she could have run from Yulyssa.
Siva watched her with eyes that were still and cold. “I’ve come to ask: Do you feel you have already caused enough pain for my family? Or do you plan still more? It has been only a few days since you forced yourself into my son’s life, and yet his life is in ruins. Do you have some influence, beyond the influence of a wild little girl? Do have some special hatred for me? Have I somehow offended you, that you must steal away and ruin what I love most?”
Skye listened to this tirade, too stunned to interrupt. When she finally found her voice she spoke softly—but she could not have held back the words if they cost her life. “He’s not your toy.” Her anger was a hot red glow at the base of her mind, forcing her to speak. “He’s not your special project.”
“Oh sooth,” Siva answered. “Divine is your project, isn’t he? Under your guidance he has left his home and his studies. He has risked his life and endangered the city—”
“It’s not like that! I didn’t make him go—”
“Now you will tell me it was his idea.”
“It doesn’t matter whose idea it was!”
“I want you to stay away from him.”
“Do you think that would make him come home to you?”
Siva flinched, as if Skye had slapped her. “You are a cruel child.”
“Not as cruel as you! You cloned him from the son you lost, and all his life, all you’ve done is force him to be that son. But that’s not who he is! That’s not him!”
As soon as the words were out, she knew she’d said too much, but it was too late to take anything back. She looked at Siva’s bloodless face and stuttered, “I- I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
It was then she noticed Devi. He had come into the courtyard with Buyu. They must have come to meet her. Clearly, Devi had heard what she’d just said. He stood frozen beside Buyu, slack-jawed with surprise.
Siva turned to follow Skye’s gaze, and smiled.
For several seconds no one spoke. Then Devi remembered to close his mouth. He swallowed hard. Skye could actually see the anger flowing into his expression, displacing shock. “You had no right to say that,” he told her, his voice soft and husky, like a growl. “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know anything about my mother.”
“Hey Dev,” Buyu said, putting a massive hand on Devi’s shoulder. “She didn’t mean—”
Devi shrugged away from Buyu’s touch and turned, leaving the courtyard at a swift walk that soon turned into a run. Siva’s gaze settled once more on Skye. Pinned to her face was a small but triumphant smile.
Skye looked away. She felt so ashamed. She’d betrayed Devi. She wasn’t supposed to know what she knew, and she certainly wasn’t supposed to say it. But the words had popped out of her mouth and there was no way now to grab them back.
She wanted to run away. She wanted to hide. She wanted to lock herself in her room and cry. But the press conference would start in half an hour and she had to be there. It might be her last chance to persuade the city to listen. As if she could persuade anybody of anything.
“Hey,” Buyu said. “You okay?”
It startled her to find him so close. He had bent down to look into her eyes. Siva Hand was gone.
Skye smiled weakly. “I have a big mouth, don’t I?”
Buyu wisely chose not to answer that. “Give Dev some time to cool off.” He hesitated. Then, “What did you mean about him being a clone?”
“It was something Yulyssa told me. I wasn’t supposed to know. I shouldn’t have said it. I should have let Devi tell me, in his own time.”
But there was no way now to take it back.
Buyu walked with her to the little auditorium in the neighborhood of Vibrant Harmony, where Yulyssa had scheduled the press conference. Skye peeked in from a side door. She counted fifty-three mediots in the audience, all waiting to talk to her.
“Nervous?” Buyu whispered.
“Terrified,” she whispered back. “But I might as well get it over with.” She lifted Ord off her shoulder and set it on the floor. She didn’t want the little robot crawling all over her, or asking silly questions while the conference was in progress. “Stay out of sight,” she warned it. “Don’t let anyone see you until I say it’s okay. I mean it, Ord.”
“Yes, good Skye.” It scurried across the floor, then oozed beneath a potted plant and disappeared.
Skye drew a deep breath, touched palms with Buyu, then stepped inside.
Facing the mediots, she tried again to make the argument she had made before the council—that she could not be the only survivor of her great ship, that other lifeboats must surely be out there—but the mediots kept asking pointless questions. What had it been like to be chased by a viperlion? Just how bad did the mound really smell? Were fourteen-year-olds still children? Did she have sex in the forest?
Skye flushed, trying again and again to return the dialogue to the lifeboats, but no one wanted to talk about that. She felt like a parrot-bird muttering its memorized speech over and over, while no one listened. When it was over, she knew she had failed to persuade anyone that her cause was real.
Buyu and Zia met her outside the auditorium. “Hey ado,” Zia said. “You did okay. They were just being twits.”
True enough, but that didn’t make her failure any easier to take. She felt hollow inside. What did she have left now? Devi was gone, no one would listen, and half the city thought she was a dumb ado taking crazy chances with everyone’s life.
Zia tried to cheer her up, but what Skye really needed was time alone. After a while, she slipped away.
She went down to Splendid Peace Park, following a path that led to the little pavilion by the outer wall, where she and Devi had talked that first night. She had just reached the final bend in the path when a flash of purple and gold fur jumped out at her from behind a tree. She yelped, while the dokey sprinted over her feet, only to turn around again, grabbing her ankles with its tiny monkey hands, while its bushy tail waved in delight.
“Jem!” She knelt, running her fingers through the dokey’s short fur. Then she froze. If Jem was here, then Devi . . .
She looked up, to see him standing in the path, watching her with troubled eyes. She flushed and looked away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were here. I’ll go—”
“No. Stay for awhile. Please?”
She picked Jem up. Then she stood, cradling the dokey against her chest. “You’re not angry?”
“Sure I am. I guess.” He shrugged. “I’m angry most of the time these days.”
“I’m sorry.”
“How did you know?”
Her cheeks burned. “Yulyssa told me.”
He nodded, as if he had already guessed as much. “I’ve got some fortune cookies. You want some?”
She wasn’t hungry, but it was a nice excuse to stay. “Sure. I guess.”
They sat facing the transparent wall of the canopy. By leaning forward just a little, Skye could look down on Deception Well’s equatorial continent. I’ve been there. It was a fact she still found astonishing.
“Here,” Devi said, lifting the lid on a small box covered in gold foil. “Have one. This is the forgiveness collection. I bought it for you.”
The fortune cookies were golden discs arranged in two neat rows. Skye picked one up and turned it over. A message scrolled across the middle in chocolate-brown letters. It proclaimed Obediance never requires forgiveness. She wrinkled her nose and fed it to Jem.
Devi laughed. “Well I haven’t looked at them all yet. Here, try this one.” He handed her another.
She held it, watching the chocolate words scroll past: I’m sorry I got angry . . . I shouldn’t have walked out on you . . . Forgive me?
She looked up at him, amazed. “How did you do that?”
A rosy flush underlay Devi’s brown skin. “Trade secret.”
“You had a right to get angry.” She nibbled at the edge of the cookie, while Jem batted the other one around on the pavilion floor.
“No,” Devi said. “It was stupid of me. It’s just that whenever I think about him—you know, my brother—I start to feel like . . . like maybe I’m not me. Only I’m not doing a very good job of being him either. He could do almost anything.”
“Sez your mom.”
Devi smiled. He threw Jem another cookie.
“Anyway,” Skye said, “we cured Compassion plague. That’s something.”
Devi grunted. “And if we could find those lifeboats, that would be something too.”
Several seconds passed in silence. Then Skye felt a touch against her hand. She looked down, to see Devi’s fingers resting cautiously on her own. “When you were sick,” he said, “I was really scared. I’ve never been that afraid before. I’ve never met anyone like you.”
Skye was in no mood to be impressed with herself. “Crazy and bad-tempered, you mean? With an out-of-control mouth?”
“Sooth. Exactly.” Devi grinned. “And smart and tough too. And pretty.”
His fingers closed around her hand. She felt a flush run through her, happy and fearful at once. She looked up, and it didn’t surprise her at all when his lips touched hers in a tentative kiss. It felt soft and slightly wet, and silly, and essential all at once. It felt demanding too, so that she had to trade a kiss with him a second time, and then a third.
She had never kissed a boy before. It alarmed her, the way that one simple gesture opened doors inside her that she had never dared to look behind. Frightened now, she pulled away. “I don’t think—”
“No. It’s okay.” Devi breathed the words into her ear, sending a delicious shiver running through her. He pulled back a little and turned his head, getting ready to kiss her again.
She stood up abruptly. “I need to think about this.”
He stared up at her, looking confused and a little angry. Then he drew a deep breath and nodded. “I understand. You’re young.”
Indignant now, she put her hands on her hips. “Right. Like you’re an old fart.” Then a new thought occurred to her. “How many girlfriends have you had?”
“One.”
“One?”
“You.”
Her eyes narrowed as she glared down at him. “I’m not your girlfriend.”
He stiffened. He studied her for several seconds, as if trying to see the landscape inside her mind. Then he shrugged. “My mistake. I must have had a vision of our future relationship.”
“That must be it.” She moved a safe distance away before she sat down again. Not really sure why. Her skin felt hungry—that was the only way she could describe it—hungry to be touched by him, but at the same time something around her heart was afraid. There’s time, she thought, and she left it at that, hoping Devi was willing to leave it alone too. For now.
After a minute or so of silence she said, “I’m not ready to give up on finding the lifeboats.”
Devi had been staring down at the cloud patterns over Deception Well’s coastal mountains, 300 kilometers below. Now he turned to her with an expression of surprise. “Of course not. But we aren’t going to get city authority behind us unless we can explain why no other lifeboats have been seen. It really is an interesting question.” He smiled, and she thought that maybe she had been forgiven.
“Let’s start over again,” he suggested. “Take a look at things from the beginning. Tannasen must have filed a detailed report on the discovery of your lifeboat. We need to pull that out of city library. We can go over it in detail, and maybe we’ll turn up some clue suggesting why the lifeboats have been so secretive. Where’s Ord?”
Skye realized she hadn’t seen Ord for quite awhile. She glanced around, then shrugged. “Somewhere . . . why?”
“Ord could do the library work for us. Hey Ord. Come here.” The little robot did not appear. “Ord?” Devi stood up, then circled the pavilion, scowling into the bushes and frowning at the path. Jem darted playfully around his feet. “Ord!” he called, louder now. “Come here, okay? Ord?”
Still the robot did not show itself. Skye stood up too, alarmed now. When was the last time she’d seen Ord? Sometime before the press conference. She hadn’t thought to look for it, because Ord always tagged after her. It never got lost. She ran a few steps down the path, peering among the lower branches of the trees. “Ord?”
“Maybe it was trapped in the building where you had the press conference,” Devi suggested.
“No way. It would just wait for a door to open, then it would slide out.”
“Maybe it did, but it couldn’t figure out where you’d gone.”
Was that possible?
She tried to remember the last time she’d seen Ord . . . and a second later, she burst out laughing.
“What?” Devi demanded.
She laughed some more. Then, struggling for breath, she tried to explain. “I warned Ord . . . to keep out of sight until I said it was okay. It doesn’t usually obey me this well.” Skye knelt on the ground. “Hey Ord, it’s okay. Trouble’s over and it’s safe to come out now.”
The shrubbery rustled. Then Ord slid onto the pavilion. “Skye is not eating right. Cookies are toy food. Come home to eat well, good Skye.”
Skye hardly heard the words. She stared at Ord, wrestling with a sudden, terrifying thought. “Devi? I . . . I think I’ve figured it out. I think I know what happened to the other lifeboats.”