The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (12 page)

“You would not believe the expense taken to keep those humans Grade Gold standard.”

“What would I do?”

“Take it in hand,
of
course. It seems our small . . . Grade Orange operation has gotten some notice. Tetsuo asked for you . . . particularly.”

“Tetsuo?” She hasn't said the name out loud in years. Her voice catches on the second syllable.

“
Mr.
Tetsuo,” Mr. Charles says, and waves a hand at her. He holds a sheet of paper, the same shade as his skin. “He wrote you a
letter.
”

Key can't move, doesn't reach out to take it, and so it flutters to the black marble floor a few feet away from Mr. Charles's egg.

He leans forward. “I think . . . I remember something . . . you and Tetsuo . . .”

“He recommended my promotion here,” Key says, after a moment. It seems the safest phrasing. Mr. Charles would have remembered this eventually; vampires are slow, but inexorable.

The diffuse light from the paper lanterns catches the bottom half of his face, highlighting the deep cleft in his chin. It twitches in faint surprise. “You
were
his pet?”

Key winces. She remembers the years she spent at his side during and after the wars, catching scraps in his wake, despised by every human who saw her there. She waited for him to see how much she had sacrificed and give her the only reward that could matter after what she'd done. Instead he had her shunt removed and sent her to Grade Orange. She has not seen or heard from him in four years. His pet, yes, that's as good a name as any—but he never drank from her. Not once.

Mr. Charles's lips, just a shade of white darker than his skin, open like a hole in a cloud. “And he wants you back. How do you
feel?
”

Terrified. Awestruck. Confused. “Grateful,” she says.

The hole smiles. “Grateful! How interesting. Come here, girl. I believe I shall
have
a
taste.
”

She grabs the letter with shaking fingers and folds it inside a pocket of her red uniform. She stands in front of Mr. Charles.

“Well?” he says.

She hasn't had a shunt in years, though she can still feel its ridged scar in the crook of her arm. Without it, feeding from her is messy, violent. Traditional, Mr. Charles might say. Her fingers hurt as she unzips the collar. Her muscles feel sore, the bones in her spine arthritic and old as she bows her head, leans closer to Mr. Charles. She waits for him to bare his fangs, to pierce her vein, to suck her blood.

He takes more than he should. He drinks until her fingers and toes twinge, until her neck throbs, until the red velvet of his seat fades to gray. When he finishes, he leaves her blood on his mouth.

“I forgive . . . you for the boy,” he says.

Jeb cut his own arteries, left his good blood all over the floor. Mr. Charles abhors waste above all else.

Mr. Charles will explain the situation. I wish you to come. If you do well, I have been authorized to offer you the highest reward.

The following night Key takes a boat to Oahu. Vampires don't like water, but they will cross it anyway—the sea has become a status symbol among them, an indication of strength. Hawai'i is still a resort destination, though most of its residents only go out at night. Grade Gold is the most expensive, most luxurious resort of them all.

Tetsuo travels between the islands often. Key saw him do it a dozen times during the war. She remembers one night, his face lit by the moon and the yellow lamps on the deck—the wide cheekbones, thick eyebrows, sharp widow's peak, all frozen in the perfection of a nineteen-year-old boy. Pale beneath the olive tones of his skin, he bares his fangs when the waves lurch beneath him.

“What does it feel like?” she asks him.

“Like frozen worms in my veins,” he says, after a full, long minute of silence. Then he checks the guns and tells her to wait below, the humans are coming. She can't see anything, but Tetsuo can smell them like chum in the water. The Japanese have held out the longest, and the vampires of Hawai'i lead the assault against them.

Two nights later, in his quarters in the bunker at the base of Mauna Kea, Tetsuo brings back a sheet of paper, written in Japanese. The only characters she recognizes are
shi
and
ta
—“death” and “field.” It looks like some kind of list.

“What is this?” she asks.

“Recent admissions to the Lanai human residential facility.”

She looks up at him, devoted with terror. “My mother?” Her father died in the first offensive on the Big Island, a hero of the resistance. He never knew how his daughter had chosen to survive.

“Here,” Tetsuo says, and runs a cold finger down the list without death. “Jen Isokawa.”

“Alive?” She has been looking for her mother since the wars began. Tetsuo knows this, but she didn't know he was searching, too. She feels swollen with this indication of his regard.

“She's listed as a caretaker. They're treated well. You could . . .” He sits beside her on the bed that only she uses. His pause lapses into a stop. He strokes her hair absentmindedly; if she had a tail, it would beat his legs. She is seventeen and she is sure he will reward her soon.

“Tetsuo,” she says, “you could drink from me, if you want. I've had a shunt for nearly a year. The others use it. I'd rather feed you.”

Sometimes she has to repeat herself three times before he seems to hear her. This she has said at least ten. But she is safe here in his bunker, on the bed he brought in for her, with his lukewarm body pressed against her warm one. Vampires do not have sex with humans; they feed. But if he doesn't want her that way, what else can she offer him?

“I've had you tested. You're fertile. If you bear three children you won't need a shunt and the residential facilities will care for you for the rest of your mortality. You can live with your mother. I will make sure you're safe.”

She presses her face against his shoulder. “Don't make me leave.”

“You wanted to see your mother.”

Her mother had spent the weeks before the invasion in church, praying for God to intercede against the abominations. Better that she die than see Key like this.

“Only to know what happened to her,” Key whispers. “Won't you feed from me, Tetsuo? I want to feel closer to you. I want you to know how much I love you.”

A long pause. Then, “I don't need to taste you to know how you feel.”

Tetsuo meets her onshore.

Just like that, she is seventeen again.

“You look older,” he says. Slowly, but with less affectation than Mr. Charles.

This is true; so inevitable she doesn't understand why he even bothers to say so. Is he surprised? Finally she nods. The buoyed dock rocks beneath them—he makes no attempt to move, though the two vampires with him grip the denuded skin of their own elbows with pale fingers. They flare and retract their fangs.

“You are drained,” he says. He does not mean this metaphorically.

She nods again, realizes further explanation is called for. “Mr. Charles,” she says, her voice a painful rasp. This embarrasses her, though Tetsuo would never notice.

He nods, sharp and curt. She thinks he is angry, though perhaps no one else could read him as clearly. She knows that face, frozen in the countenance of a boy dead before the Second World War. A boy dead fifty years before she was born.

He is old enough to remember Pearl Harbor, the detention camps, the years when Maui's forests still had native birds. But she has never dared ask him about his human life.

“And what did Charles explain?”

“He said someone killed herself at Grade Gold.”

Tetsuo flares his fangs. She flinches, which surprises her. She used to flush at the sight of his fangs, her blood pounding red just beneath the soft surface of her skin.

“I've been given dispensation,” he says, and rests one finger against the hollow at the base of her throat.

She's learned a great deal about the rigid traditions that restrict vampire life since she first met Tetsuo. She understands why her teenage fantasies of morally liberated vampirism were improbable, if not impossible. For each human they bring over, vampires need a special dispensation that they only receive once or twice every decade.
The highest reward.
If Tetsuo has gotten a dispensation, then her first thought when she read his letter was correct. He didn't mean retirement. He didn't mean a peaceful life in some remote farm on the islands. He meant death. Un-death.

After all these years, Tetsuo means to turn her into a vampire.

The trouble at Grade Gold started with a dead girl. Penelope cut her own throat five days ago (with a real knife, the kind they allow Grade Gold humans for cutting food). Her ghost haunts the eyes of those she left behind. One human resident in particular, with hair dyed the color of tea and blue lipstick to match the bruises under her red eyes, takes one look at Key and starts to scream.

Key glances at Tetsuo, but he has forgotten her. He stares at the girl as if he could burn her to ashes on the plush green carpet. The five others in the room look away, but Key can't tell if it's in embarrassment or fear. The luxury surrounding them chokes her. There's a bowl of fruit on a coffee table. Real fruit—fuzzy brown kiwis, mottled red-green mangos, dozens of tangerines. She takes an involuntary step forward and the girl's scream gets louder before cutting off with an abrupt squawk. Her labored breaths are the only sound in the room.

“This is a joke,” the girl says. There's spittle on her blue lips. “What hole did you dig her out of?”

“Go to your room, Rachel,” Tetsuo says.

Rachel flicks back her hair and rubs angrily under one eye. “What are you now, Daddy Vampire? You think you can just, what? Replace her? With this broke-down fogy look-alike?”

“She is not—”

“Yeah? What is she?”

They are both silent, doubt and grief and fury scuttling between them like beetles in search of a meal. Tetsuo and the girl stare at each other with such deep familiarity that Key feels forgotten, alone—almost ashamed of the dreams that have kept her alive for a decade. They have never felt so hopeless, or so false.

“Her name is Key,” Tetsuo says, in something like defeat. He turns away, though he makes no move to leave. “She will be your new caretaker.”

“Key?” the girl says. “What kind of a name is that?”

Key doesn't answer for a long time, thinking of all the ways she could respond. Of Obaachan Akiko and the affectionate nickname of lazy summers spent hiking in the mountains or pounding mochi in the kitchen. Of her half-Japanese mother and Hawai'ian father, of the ways history and identity and circumstance can shape a girl into half a woman, until someone—
not a man
—comes with a hundred thousand others like him and destroys anything that might have once had meaning. So she finds meaning in him. Who else was there?

And this girl, whose sneer reveals her bucked front teeth, has as much chance of understanding that world as Key does of understanding this one. Fresh fruit on the table. No uniforms. And a perfect, glittering shunt of plastic and metal nestled in the crook of her left arm.

“Mine,” Key answers the girl.

Rachel spits; Tetsuo turns his head, just a little, as though he can only bear to see Key from the corner of his eye.

“You're nothing like her,” she says.

“Like who?”

But the girl storms from the room, leaving her chief vampire without a dismissal. Key now understands this will not be punished. It's another one—a boy, with the same florid beauty as the girl but far less belligerence, who answers her.

“You look like Penelope,” he says, tugging on a long lock of his asymmetrically cut black hair. “Just older.”

When Tetsuo leaves the room, it's Key who cannot follow.

Key remembers sixteen. Her obaachan is dead and her mother has moved to an apartment in Hilo and it's just Key and her father in that old, quiet house at the end of the road. The vampires have annexed San Diego and Okinawa is besieged, but life doesn't feel very different in the mountains of the Big Island.

It is raining in the woods behind her house. Her father has told her to study, but all she's done since her mother left is read Mishima's Sea of Fertility novels. She sits on the porch, wondering if it's better to kill herself or wait for them to come, and just as she thinks she ought to have the courage to die, something rattles in the shed. A rat, she thinks.

But it's not a rat she sees when she pulls open the door on its rusty hinges. It's a man, crouched between a stack of old appliance boxes and the rusted fender of the Buick her father always meant to fix one day. His hair is wet and slicked back, his white shirt is damp and ripped from shoulder to navel. The skin beneath it is pale as a corpse; bloodless, though the edges of a deep wound are still visible.

“They've already come?” Her voice breaks on a whisper. She wanted to finish
The Decay of the Angel.
She wanted to see her mother once more.

“Shut the door,” he says, crouching in shadow, away from the bar of light streaming through the narrow opening.

“Don't kill me.”

“We are equally at each other's mercy.”

She likes the way he speaks. No one told her they could sound so proper. So human. Is there a monster in her shed, or is he something else?

“Why shouldn't I open it all the way?”

He is brave, whatever else. He takes his long hands from in front of his face and stands, a flower blooming after rain. He is beautiful, though she will not mark that until later. Now, she only notices the steady, patient way he regards her.
I could move faster than you
, his eyes say.
I could kill you first.