When something terrible happens in a marriage, it either tears you apart, or it forces you together—and there is nothing that can happen to you that is more terrible than losing a child.
Before the SZA, Kara and I had spent years barely touching each other. We slept on opposite sides of the bed. We waved to each other in the morning, and in the evening she stared at her tablet while I made rat-birds. Then, in short order, Kara walked in on me with Bree, Hannah disappeared, Kara dove headlong into a redneck orgy, and I got shot. You’d think that would have ended us.
It didn’t, though.
By the time we got home from Briarwood, my shoulder was already knitting itself back together. Say what you will about the Goo Flu, it’s great for your immune system, and better for your tissue repair. Kara helped me wrap it up anyway. When that was done, we climbed into bed together, and we wrapped ourselves around each other, and we cried.
The sun was down by the time Kara started puking. I held her hair back. I brought her water. I hugged her when she was shivering, and pulled the blankets away when the sweat came pouring out of her. That went on for three days. When it was done, she was yellow. The pheromone magic was gone for both of us. We didn’t need the VapoRub anymore.
We still needed each other, though. I wrapped myself around her. She wrapped herself around me.
We cried.
It was Sunday morning, and I was sitting on the couch in the living room. The wallscreen was showing a news clip about riots in Bethesda, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Kara was upstairs, sleeping. She’d been doing that more and more.
She said that when she was dreaming, she still had a daughter.
It was just the opposite for me. I hadn’t really slept in a week or more. The old nightmares had come back with a vengeance. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Hannah alone somewhere, hurt, frightened, dying—and where was I?
I’d promised to keep her safe.
I hadn’t, though. I’d left her alone. Forget about Bree. I couldn’t believe Kara had forgiven me for that.
I was just about to shut the screen down, maybe go upstairs and see if I could get Kara to come down and eat something, when it blanked on its own. I opened my mouth to ask what had happened, but before I could speak, the signal-loss symbol reformed into the shape of a smiling cartoon dog.
“Drew,” it said. “Good to see you, my friend. How’s tricks?”
I stared at it.
“Well,” it said, “I can see you’ve got a busy day of catatonia ahead of you, and as it happens I’m a bit pressed for time myself, so let’s cut to the chase, shall we?”
I kept staring. The dog’s smile faltered a bit.
“Okay. Drew? You’re making me a little uncomfortable here. Are you having a stroke? If you’re having a stroke, blink the eye that still works.”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “I am not having a stroke. What are you doing here, Inchy?”
The smile came back in full force.
“Great. Really glad to hear that your brain is unclotted, because, as it happens, I need some information that you’ve got locked up in there. If you had the decency to give yourself a wireless neural interface I could just go in and get it—but, since you don’t, we’re going to need to force it out through your mouth hole.”
I leaned forward, closed my eyes, and rested my forehead on my palms.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“An excellent question, Drew—one I will be happy to answer in full, just as soon as you give me your access codes for the Bioteka infonet.”
I groaned, and let my head sink a little lower.
“Go away, Inchy. I don’t have the patience for your bullshit right now.”
“No,” it said. “I’m really going to have to insist here, Drew. You remember Hannah, right? A bit smaller than you, blonde hair, used to live here?”
My head snapped up.
“Good, so you do remember her. Anyway, it seems she’s gotten herself into a bit of a pickle . . .”
I was on my feet by then and across the room, fingers clawing at the edges of the wallscreen.
“Where is she, you lump of shit? What have you . . .”
The dog raised both hands in surrender.
“Hey now, Drew. Let’s simmer down, shall we? First off, I haven’t done anything to her. I am the one who’s actually doing something useful to help her, while you hang around here, wallowing in your own crapulence. You’re welcome, by the way. Second, you do know I’m not actually inside your wallscreen, right? If you destroy this thing, I’ll just show up on your phone, or your intercom, or on the touch screen on your microwave oven, until either you give me what I need, or you stall long enough that it’s too late for me to help—which would be unfortunate because, as I think I mentioned, the thing I am trying to help with is Hannah getting rescued, which I assume we can safely say is a concept we are both on board with.”
I took a step back then, lowered my hands, and took a deep breath in.
“There you go,” Inchy said. “Breath it out. Namaste. Give me your access codes.”
“Where is she?”
The dog shook its head.
“That, I cannot tell you.”
I closed my eyes again, and swallowed a scream.
“Why?”
“Because if I did, you would go charging to the rescue in your self-driving, network-integrated buggy. Ten minutes later, I’d have to rescue you, just like I’m about to have to rescue my original monkey extraction team. Which reminds me. Access codes?”
“Why, Inchy? Why do you need my codes?”
The dog sighed.
“Well, as it happens, I am regrettably short of physical assets at the moment—and, as I’m sure you’re aware, you monkeys are all about physical assets for some reason. As a result, I need to divert a few items from your employer’s inventory. I’ll only need them for a couple of hours, and when I’m done with them I promise to return whatever is left of them post-haste. I will also button things up, access-code-wise, so they’re just like they were before I cracked every firewall in the Bioteka network. You will definitely probably mostly not get into trouble over this.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for that, but I still have no idea what you’re talking about. If you could . . .”
The dog tapped his wrist with one finger.
“Tempus fugit, Drew. I don’t want to apply undue pressure here, but the unfortunate fact is that in the process of discovering where my compadre Hannah is and prepping the whole extraction process, I may have inadvertently triggered a facility-wide biocontainment system. While I’m here jawing with you, I’m also there trying to prevent Hannah from getting sterilized. The locks I have in place are holding for the moment, but I can’t guarantee that situation is going to continue indefinitely. So. Codes?”
I stared at him.
He stared at me.
And then, God help me, I gave him my codes.
“Thanks,” he said. “You definitely probably won’t regret this. Further bulletins as events warrant.”
The screen went blank. I took two steps back and dropped onto the couch.
“Drew? Were you just talking to someone?”
I turned. Kara was standing in the hallway, rubbing sleep from her eyes. I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “I mean yes, but it was just something on the wallscreen.”
She came into the room, sat down beside me and rested her head on my shoulder.
“Talking to yourself now?”
I slid my arm around her. The wallscreen flickered back to life, started showing aerial clips of street fighting from Los Angeles.
“Off,” Kara said. “I can’t watch that right now.”
The screen went blank again. Before it did, though, it flashed for an instant to an image of a cartoon dog with a shit-eating grin on its face, giving me two thumbs up. Kara’s head rose up a fraction of an inch.
“What was that?”
I closed my eyes, and reached up to stroke her hair.
“Nothing,” I said. “It was nothing. Just a ghost in the machine.”