Inheritance (28 page)

Had she ever noticed that he was several inches taller than her? She had to stand on her tiptoes, stretching her arms up to slip them around his neck. His upper back felt strangely unfamiliar beneath her hands, a landscape of muscle she didn’t know. He pulled her closer, his hands on her waist, and she arched her back to fit against him. The heat that built inside her came slower than it had when she could also sense him, but it was unmistakable: a glowing flame that began to lick at her belly. He turned her, pushing her against the door, and in an awkward dance she moved her arms, whispering “Let me—” And she circled her arms around his waist.

Cracks broke in her consciousness—and in his. She saw brief flashes of what he was feeling: her hair tangled in his fingers; the taste of her mouth. She shuddered as the walls of her conscious self began to crumble, and she tried to hold them up at the same time that she wanted to drink in his emotions. It didn’t work.

And then David was pulling away from her even as she tried
to drag him closer. He planted his hands on the door on either side of her head and pushed back.

“I don’t think that was even five minutes,” he said, breathless.

She lifted her hand to her mouth; her lips felt bruised. David’s eyes were dark, his mouth red from kissing her. She felt weak. She felt exhilarated. “Three minutes maybe.”

He laughed shortly and took a step back. She reached out, hooking a finger on his belt loop. “David.”

He looked down at her hand, but she didn’t let go. “Yeah,” he said, his voice rough.

“I’m sorry.”

He glanced up, puzzled. “Why?”

“Because I’m a dork,” she whispered. “Because I can’t say anything I really want to say, and I just want you to know it’s because I want you to like me.”

The expression on his face softened. “I do like you. Didn’t you notice?”

She was embarrassed. “Maybe.”

“Well, you better start noticing,” he said, but his tone was gentle. He reached behind her, and she thought he was going to kiss her again, but he was only going for the door handle. “We should go back before Julian get suspicious.”

“He’s already suspicious.”

David laughed, and for the first time all day, Reese felt like things were probably going to be all right.

After school on Monday, David and Reese told Mr. Hernandez that yes, the Imria could use their abilities to sense what humans
were thinking. He didn’t seem to put much stock in Eres Tilhar’s statements about ethics. “Have you gotten photos of the adaptation chamber yet?” he asked.

“We haven’t been able to find the adaptation chamber,” Reese said.

“We’ll get them in time,” David assured him.

They had to leave right afterward to get to David’s soccer game—the first of the fall season. It was a home game, and because the opposing team was their biggest rival, Reese knew there would be a decent turnout, but she hadn’t expected that having David on the team would draw so many spectators. The stands were completely filled, and Reese huddled with Madison and Julian and Bri, hoping nobody would realize she was there. David didn’t even start—he’d missed too many practices that summer—but when he was substituted in midway through the second half, photographers fanned out along the sidelines and Reese felt the crowd focus on him. Their attention was so strong that she suspected David could feel it too, even out on the field. He didn’t score, and sometimes she saw him turning his back to the crowd as if he were trying to shut them out.

Kennedy won 3–2, and afterward David was surrounded by press. When his coach finally extricated him, Reese saw him retreat to the locker room, white-faced. That was when the photographers noticed her, waiting near the entrance to the high school with her friends. Cameras flashed as rapidly as strobe lights, and she held up her hand to shield her eyes, but they didn’t relent. Madison put an arm around her and said, “Let’s go inside.” As Julian pulled open the door, Bri shouted at the photographers, “Leave them alone!”

Inside, the hallways echoed with distant sounds from the boys’ locker room. Reese ducked into a shadowy recess between a trophy case and the door to the computer lab. “Thanks,” she said to Madison.

“They’re so annoying,” Madison grumbled. “Did you know they’ve started trying to get
me
to talk about you? I got followed home from school one day!”

“Did they? I’m sorry,” Reese said.

Madison shrugged. “Whatever. I told them I wasn’t talking.”

Julian leaned against the trophy case. “Once they took a photo of me flipping them off. I saw it on the Hub—it got five thousand likes in ten minutes.”

Reese laughed weakly. “You guys… thanks.”

“I don’t know how you deal with it,” Bri said. “They are relentless.”

“Come on,” Madison said. “It’s boring here. Let’s go wait by the boys’ locker room.”

Julian groaned.

“Shut up, you know you want to, Julian,” Madison said.

“Yeah, but I don’t,” Bri objected.

“You’re coming!” Madison insisted, and grabbed Bri’s arm to drag her down the hall.

When the soccer team emerged from the locker room, they absorbed Reese and her friends into their big herd of soapy-smelling boys and shouted jokes, shielding her and David from the photographers waiting outside the school. They descended on a taqueria two blocks away and took up all the tables, and as Reese waited for her burrito to be made she watched David laughing with his teammates, and Bri and Julian arguing over
some obscure plot point on
Doctor Who
, and even though she knew the press was waiting on the sidewalk, for this moment she felt safe.

There was something magical about it: this warm September night, the yellow-and-green flags fluttering from the ceiling, the salsa burning hot on her tongue, the Mexican Coke a rush of sugary sweetness.
This is normal
, she thought, and she wanted to cry.

On Saturday, Reese’s father took her and David to
Angel Island. She had thought about what Eres told her at the end of their last lesson. She was determined, today, to let the teacher see everything; she wanted to know how to use this adaptive ability. She didn’t expect to see Amber sitting in one of the chairs when the door to Eres’s room opened.

“Good morning,” Eres said, standing up. The teacher’s gray robe hung down to the floor in one long column. With white hair and a pale face, Eres was almost ghostly.

“Hi,” Amber said, standing as well. She was dressed in jeans and a baby-blue T-shirt that had
MISSION
stamped on it, her face bare of makeup, a lock of her hair held back with a plain clip. She looked so utterly ordinary in the triangular space with its luminous walls that Reese found it completely jarring.

“Hi,” David said warily.

“What are you doing here?” Reese asked. She had finally begun to forget about Amber—hadn’t she?—and now here she was, biting her lip and looking like a nice girl. Reese’s feet planted in the doorway; she couldn’t move any farther into the room. She wouldn’t.

“We’re going to do something different today,” Eres said. “David, I’m going to work with you individually. And, Reese, you are going to work with Amber.”

“What? Why?”

“I spoke with Amber since the last time you were here,” Eres said. “I believe it will be helpful for you to spend some time working with her.”

Reese glanced at David. He didn’t look happy. “I don’t think working with Amber will help,” Reese said to Eres.

Amber’s face darkened, but she didn’t speak.

“How will you know if you don’t try?” Eres asked.

Reese couldn’t answer the question.
I just know
sounded too much like something an impertinent kid might say, but that was the only thing Reese could come up with.

“Amber, the two of you should go somewhere private,” Eres said. “David and I will stay here.” Eres sat down again, clearly waiting for Amber and Reese to leave.

Amber headed for the door. Reese backed away so that Amber didn’t touch her when she passed. “Come on,” Amber said, waiting in the corridor.

Reese looked at David, hoping for a way out, but his expression was guarded. He shook his head very slightly as if to say
It’s your decision
, and then he sat down to face Eres. Reese realized
the only options she had were to go with Amber or to throw a temper tantrum and refuse to do as Eres asked. The stern expression on Eres’s face made Reese think the teacher would definitely not take kindly to the latter. So she turned away from Eres and David and stiffly followed Amber into the corridor. She wished that Amber didn’t still affect her so strongly.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” Amber asked tentatively. “We don’t have to stay inside. It’s a beautiful day.”

The corridor was dim and claustrophobic, and the idea of going outside seemed like a lifeline to Reese. “Yes. Let’s go outside.”

Amber led the way through the ship, and Reese kept her eyes on the floor. Amber was wearing her purple Converse sneakers. Reese flashed back to the first time she had noticed them, the day they’d had coffee at the café across from the park. She shoved the memory away angrily.
Stop it
, she told herself.
Everything is different now.

As they exited the ship, walking down the ramp, Amber pointed at the yellow Victorian houses across the road. “Those were the officers’ quarters. There’s a building up there with a sign that says ‘Bake House.’ Apparently the soldiers liked their fresh-baked bread.”

“How do you know that?” Reese asked.

“There’s a plaque over there that explains it. This place used to be called Camp Reynolds. It was occupied by the US Army in the nineteenth century.” She started walking toward the sign and gestured at the row of whitewashed, boarded-up buildings. “That was called Officers’ Row. I guess they had a lot of officers.
They used to have barracks for the ordinary soldiers across the field, but they were torn down in the 1930s.”

“Did they give you a guided tour when you landed here or something?”

“No. But there isn’t much to do here, you know. During the week, I spend a lot of time walking around and reading the signs.”

They turned right at the end of the gravel road, where a sloping path led downhill past Officers’ Row toward the bay. Reese glanced at Amber as they walked toward the water. “I thought you’d have stuff to do. Like, I don’t know, some high-tech spacey stuff or something.”

Amber’s eyebrows rose. “No. Hirin Sagal deals with some stuff like that. I haven’t been trained in that area, so I try to keep out of his way.”

“What does everybody else do?” Reese asked, curiosity pushing aside some of her defensiveness. “I’ve only seen a few of you—where is everybody?”

“Akiya Deyir is working on setting up the United Nations stuff. He has several assistants helping him, and they’re always having conference calls with other nations. My mother and the others from Project Plato are putting together their research. They’re going to release that at the UN, too, and a lot of it has to be translated into, well, human terms. Sometimes I help them figure out how to say things, since I grew up here. I guess I act sort of as a cultural translator.”

They had reached the end of the gravel path, and as Amber stepped onto the grass to continue toward the bay, Reese glanced
back at the ship. On top of the triangular tip of the craft, a line of seagulls were perched, white feathers stark against the black ship.

“There’s a little beach out here,” Amber said. “It’s nice. We can sit on the wall.”

Reese was still staring at the gulls. “I never see birds in the city anymore, but I always see them when I come here.”

“That’s probably because we don’t kill them.”

Amber’s words were disconcerting. Reese turned to look at her. She was waiting near the edge of the grass that overlooked the strip of sand, her face expectant. “You want to sit?” The ghost of a grin crossed her face. “At least it’s warm today.”

Reese remembered the last time—the only time—she had gone to a beach with Amber: the cold, brisk wind at Ocean Beach ruffling over the two of them as they lay on a blanket in the shelter of a sand dune. Reese was unexpectedly flustered, and she shoved her hands into her pockets as she stepped onto the grass. “So what else do you do here besides explain the weird customs of my people?” Reese asked. “How much time do you spend e-mailing my best friend?”

The smile on Amber’s face faltered. “He told you.”

“Of course he told me. He’s my
best friend
.”

Amber lowered herself onto the edge of the wall and gazed out at the bay. It was warm but overcast, and in the distance Reese saw a container ship moving slowly across the water. She began to think that Amber was never going to answer when she finally spoke.

“I only wanted to find out how you were feeling,” Amber said. “Whether you were going to call us with the phone I gave you.”

Reese sat down a couple of feet away from her. The wall was rough beneath her hands. “How did you get his e-mail address?”

“He works at that Bin 42 site. It’s public info.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me directly?”

Amber’s face reddened, but she didn’t look at Reese. “You were so mad at me. I didn’t think you’d want to talk to me. Maybe I shouldn’t have e-mailed him, but I didn’t know what else to do. I had to—” Her voice broke. She took a quick breath. “I had to do it. I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again.”