Inheritance (10 page)

All she could see was the ground. The asphalt was dark gray and splotchy near her head, where something had spilled and left a stain shaped like a pear. The street shook with footsteps. Police officers were nearby, yelling for the man to drop the weapon, to lie on the ground, to put his arms behind his back. The scraping sound of metal across concrete told her that the barrier was being pushed back into place. The chanting slowly began again.
Don’t believe the lies. They’re here to colonize
.

It was surreal: the absurdly hilarious rhyme of the demonstrators’ chant. The hard, pebbly surface of the ground, reminding
her of the asphalt outside Blue Base, where the blast had thrown her into the hot desert. The immobilizing pressure of her parents’ flesh and bone against her, their child. They would die for her, and she was overwhelmed by the knowledge of it, heavy as weights tied to her ankles.

Finally, when she felt as if she might be suffocated by it all, her parents helped her up, still surrounding her, still preventing her from seeing what was happening, and herded her the last fifteen feet toward the security checkpoint. Police officers in their black uniforms pushed her through the gate. The scent of the bay, salty and sour with yesterday’s fish, filled her nostrils. Ahead of her the ferry to Angel Island waited like a safe house, the ramp reminding her of the ramp that had emerged from the belly of the Imrian spacecraft.

“Go, go!” her mom said, pushing her up the ramp.

Her legs wobbled as the ferry rocked in the water of the bay. They wouldn’t let her look back. They pushed her inside and onto a padded, disturbingly warm seat. Her head spun from the aftermath of the attack. She was still trying to separate out her own feelings from the tangled threads of everyone else she had just encountered. There were voices all around her and inside her, and she couldn’t tell them apart. Her mom was on the phone yelling at someone. Her dad spoke in hushed, urgent tones to a stranger. Someone apologized over and over.
Reese. Reese.
A person thrust a cup of water into her hands, but she pushed it away. Then her mom was seated next to her, holding the cup to her mouth. The liquid was cool against her lips, but she gagged.

“I don’t want it,” she muttered.

“Honey, are you all right?” her mom asked, rubbing her hand over Reese’s back. A jolt of anxiety went through Reese, and she cringed away from her mom. She pushed herself out of the seat on unsteady legs and lurched across the slanting floor of the ferry, banging into another row of seats.

The door to the deck was ahead of her, a yawning window of bright light. Her vision was blurred. She went for the door. Her dad tried to stop her, but she shook him off. “I need some air,” she said. She stepped out onto the deck, and there was San Francisco Bay and the sky, blue and slate gray, and she sucked in a deep breath of briny, fishy air and thought it was the best-smelling thing in the world.

She leaned against the railing, staring down at the water, and breathed.

Slowly, she came back to herself. She realized that her parents were standing a few feet away, watching her. “I’m okay,” she said to them. “I just needed some air.”

Her mom came a step closer.

“Please don’t touch me right now,” Reese said.

Her mom stopped. “Is it your—your adaptation?”

“Yes.” She swallowed something acidic and looked toward the dock. A line of police officers blocked the bottom of the ferry ramp. Beyond them the demonstrators were a mob of signs and motion, but she couldn’t see the man who had drawn the gun. “Where’s David?” she asked. “Is he here yet?”

“No,” her mom answered.

Reese pulled her phone out of her pocket and found David’s number. Her hands were shaking.

“Honey, why don’t you sit down?” her dad said, trying to sound soothing.

She paid no attention to him, lifting the phone to her ear as she continued to scan the dock for any signs of David. His phone rang and rang, but he didn’t answer. She hung up, feeling queasy. “Who are those protesters? Were they in front of our house?”

“I don’t know,” her mom said. “I think some of them were, but these people are much better organized.”

“I think we should go back inside,” her dad said. He looked worried. “I don’t like being out here. We’re too exposed.”

The implication of his words was clear. He thought there could be more protesters with guns. Suddenly the cool tang of the air over the bay didn’t feel so good to Reese. She let her father usher her back into the ferry, where she saw several other people milling around. There were reporters holding microrecorders, photographers and video camera operators. There were a few politicians, too, recognizable by the flag pins on their lapels. Reese and her parents sat down in a row of overly soft seats on the side of the ferry farthest away from the dock, and Reese kept an eye on the main entrance. She saw Senator Michaelson come in, and her mom went over to talk to her. She saw other reporters gathering together to compare notes. A couple of police officers entered, looking frazzled. Finally, just as Reese was beginning to completely freak out, she saw David and his parents coming up the ramp.

She ran to meet him, hugging him as soon as he entered the ferry. “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice muffled against his
neck. As she held him she was nearly overwhelmed by how clearly she saw his interior landscape. Adrenaline lingered inside him like a wire still reverberating.

His arms tightened around her, relief sluicing through them both.
I’m fine
, he thought.

She pressed her hands against his back as if to make sure he hadn’t sustained any wounds, and cameras flashed. They sprang apart, startled.

“This isn’t a photo op,” David’s mom said coolly.

The photographer backed away. “Sorry, ma’am.”

Grace Li frowned at him and directed David and Reese away from the photographers. “Let’s go join your parents, Reese.”

As they walked across the ferry, Reese asked, “What happened? I called your phone but you didn’t answer.”

“I must not have heard it. It was so loud out there.” David’s face was pale and he looked as queasy as Reese had felt when she first boarded the ferry. “The police had to escort us from the taxi. We got a call on the way here saying there was a security situation.”

They sat down side by side, their parents taking the row ahead of them. “There was a guy with a gun,” Reese said.

“I heard,” David said. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

Reese glanced at their parents; they were talking in low voices and occasionally looking at her and David in concern. She turned to David and whispered, “I heard voices this time—like you described. It was so weird. I’ve never heard them before.”

“Really?” David grimaced. “I think I could feel the crowd’s emotions too. It made me want to throw up afterward.”

She saw their parents eyeing them and she reached for David’s
hand, linking her fingers with his so they could communicate without speaking out loud. His pulse was rapid, his body still hypervigilant after the experience outside.
Has it ever happened to you before?
she asked him.
Do you think our abilities are changing?

They must be. I think it might have happened before, like when we were in front of your house at the press conference. I didn’t really understand it, and maybe it was because I was holding your hand. But today it was way more intense.

I have to learn how to block the crowds or else I’m going to go crazy
.

You and me both
.

The ferry door clanged shut and the engine rumbled on. Reese turned her head to look out the window. The boat was leaving the dock.

Reese didn’t think she had ever been to Angel Island
before. Alcatraz, yes. She remembered a school trip there in sixth grade, and the frightening dankness of the abandoned cells. She had learned about Angel Island in social studies class, how the island was once an immigration station that detained thousands of Asian immigrants—mostly Chinese—for months and sometimes years while they waited to be admitted to the United States. She couldn’t decide if it was fitting or unfortunate that the Imria were now on Angel Island, decades after that immigration station had closed.

“Have you been here before?” Reese asked David as the ferry approached the dock.

“I came here last year with my Chinese school class. We visited the immigration center. It was depressing.”

“Why?”

“You can see where the immigrants wrote these poems in Chinese on the wall while they were held there. They were prisoners, basically. You can stand in the room where the men slept, and with all the writing on the wall, it’s like they’re still trapped there.” He paused. “It doesn’t exactly make you proud to be an American.” His words were edged with sarcasm, and she could hear the subtext clearly:
My country did that to people like me.

Reese didn’t know what to say to that. Before she and David had kissed, she had rarely thought of him as being Chinese American—he was just David—but somehow the change in their relationship caused her to recognize his racial background in a way she never had before. The comments online following their first press conference had been especially sobering—and disturbing. In the last few days when she had gone online to read the news, she had tried to resist reading the comments, but she had given in to her curiosity. She had been appalled by how casually people threw out racist comments on the Internet. David couldn’t escape the fact that he was Chinese American. He was loved and gushed over by Asians, especially the Chinese, but he was also heckled and judged for being Asian. She had never anticipated that his race could come with so much baggage, and she wasn’t sure what she should do about it.

David saw the pensive expression on her face and asked, “What’s wrong?” He put his hand on her knee.

She avoided his gaze and looked out the window at the approaching island. “What you said about Angel Island made me think about those comments online. It’s so awful. I didn’t know people still thought that way.”

“You shouldn’t read that stuff.”

“They’re a bunch of assholes,” she said vehemently. “What century do they think they’re in?”

“Forget about it. There’s nothing you can do.”

“But it’s awful,” she said, finally looking at him. Tension radiated through him from his hand. “Don’t you want to smack them, at least?”

He smiled ruefully. “Sometimes. But how would that improve anything? Besides, you have to look at the big picture. Those racist comments are coming from a minority of haters in the US. There are way more people on this planet who look like me than like you. I’m not going to waste my time thinking about people who hate me because I’m Asian.” His words were confident, but there was an undercurrent of anger mingled with resignation running through him, and it made frustration boil up inside Reese.

Before she could respond, the ferry came to an unexpectedly abrupt stop. David removed his hand from her knee, and she could tell that he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“You ready?” he asked.

“Not really.” But she got up anyway and followed the others off the ferry.

It had been cool and foggy in San Francisco, but the sun was shining on Angel Island. A metal ramp led from the boat to the landing, a wide concrete expanse with an information booth to the left and a café visible down the paved road to the right. Two people in dark gray suits were waiting—a woman and a man whom Reese did not recognize—and behind them were stationed National Guard troops, weapons at the ready. When
everyone had disembarked from the ferry, Reese counted about three dozen people in all, including her family and David’s. For the first time in a long time, she did not see Agent Forrestal or any other men in black.
I guess they’re not invited
, she thought.

“Welcome to Angel Island,” said the woman in the gray suit. Reese guessed that she was Imrian, because she had the same quality that Reese had seen in Dr. Brand and Agent Todd—a presence that made Reese feel as if she recognized them, even when she had never seen them before. Reese wondered what had happened to Agent Todd; he had vanished after the bunker at Area 51 exploded. The woman continued: “We’ll begin today with a press conference in front of the visitors’ center. Afterward, we’ll bring small groups of you to tour the spacecraft. Please follow me.”

It was only a few minutes’ walk to the visitors’ center, where folding chairs were arranged in rows on the lawn across from a two-story white building that reminded Reese of a colonial home. The lawn extended down to the cove, which was empty except for the ferry. Up front, facing the folding chairs, a podium was flanked by a dozen more chairs where several individuals were already seated. As Reese drew closer, she realized they must be the other Imria, because Amber was among them.

Disconcerted, Reese averted her eyes, and then felt self-conscious. She had known that Amber would be there; this wasn’t a surprise. Reese’s parents took seats in the last row, and she, David, and his parents filed in after them. Once she was seated, Reese deliberately looked at the Imria. The man and woman who had greeted them were speaking to someone else Reese recognized: Dr. Brand. Most of the Imria were dressed
similarly, in gray or navy suits. Some of the women wore skirts; some did not. Amber was wearing a sleeveless charcoal-gray dress that made her look as if she was going to a business meeting. Her short blond hair was swept back, and she kept her eyes trained on her hands, folded in her lap. Reese found herself feeling slighted by the fact that Amber didn’t acknowledge her, and then she was irritated by the seesaw of her own emotions.

She was relieved when a tall, dark-skinned man approached the podium, giving her something else to focus on. “Welcome,” the man said. He had short, straight black hair, and he moved with a fluid elegance that belonged on a stage, not on a windswept beach in the middle of San Francisco Bay. “I am Akiya Deyir, designated ambassador of the Imria, and I am very glad to convey my people’s greetings to you.” His accent was slight but noticeable, giving his formal language a foreign lilt. When he said the word
Imria
, it seemed to have more syllables than the letters called for.