The City of Mirrors (9 page)

Hollis closed the book and removed his reading glasses—another new development. With little half-moon lenses, cloudy and scratched, set in a black plastic frame, Sara thought they made him look distinguished, though Hollis said they made him feel old.

“Apparently, it’s a boat that goes underwater. Sounds like bullshit to me, but the story’s not bad. Are you hungry? I can fix you something if you want.”

She was, but eating felt like too much effort. “All I want to do is go to bed.”

She checked on Kate, who was sound asleep, and washed up at the sink. She paused to examine herself in the mirror. No doubt about it, the years were starting to show. Fans of wrinkles had formed around her eyes; her blond hair, which she now wore shorter and pulled back, had thinned somewhat; her skin was beginning to lose its tightness. She’d always thought of herself as pretty and, in a certain light, still was. But sometime in the midst of life she had passed the apex. In the past, when she’d looked at her reflection, she had still seen the little girl she’d once been; the woman in the mirror had still been an extension of her girlhood self. Now it was the future she saw. The wrinkles would deepen; her skin would sag; the lights of her eyes would dim. Her youth was fading, easing into the past.

And yet this thought did not disturb her, or not very much. With age came authority, and with authority came the power to be useful—to heal and comfort and bring new people into the world.
You’ll be in our prayers, Dr. Wilson.
Sara heard words like these nearly every day, but she had never become inured to them. Just that name, Dr. Wilson. It still amazed her to hear someone say it and know they were speaking to her. When Sara had arrived in Kerrville, three years ago, she’d reported to the hospital to see if her nurse’s training could be of any use. In a little windowless room, a doctor by the name of Elacqua quizzed her at length—bodily systems, diagnostics, treatments for illness and injury. His face showed no emotion as he responded to her answers with marks on a clipboard. The grilling lasted over two hours; by its conclusion, Sara felt like she was stumbling blind in a windstorm. What use could her meager training be to a medical establishment that was so far ahead of the homespun remedies of the Colony? How could she have been so naïve? “Well, I guess that about covers it,” Dr. Elacqua said. “Congratulations.” Sara was knocked flat; was he being ironic? “Does this mean I can be a nurse?” she asked. “A nurse? No. We have plenty of nurses. Report back here tomorrow, Ms. Wilson. Your training starts at oh-seven-hundred sharp. My guess is twelve months should do it.” “Training for what?” she asked, and Elacqua, whose lengthy inquisition was a mere shadow of things to come, said, with unconcealed impatience, “Perhaps I’m not being clear. I don’t know where you learned it, but you know twice as much as you have any right to. You’re going to be a doctor.”

And then, of course, there was Kate. Their beautiful, amazing, miraculous Kate. Sara and Hollis would have liked to have had a second child, but the violence of Kate’s birth had inflicted too much damage. A disappointment, and not without irony, as day by day new babies traveled into the world beneath her hands, but Sara was hardly entitled to complain. That she should have found her daughter at all, and that the two of them should have been reunited with Hollis and escaped the Homeland to travel back to Kerrville to be a family together—
miracle
was hardly the word. Sara was not religious in the churchgoing sense—the sisters all struck her as good people, if a bit extreme in their beliefs—but only an idiot would fail to feel the actions of providence. You couldn’t wake up each day in a world like that and not spend a solid hour just thinking of ways to be grateful.

She thought rarely of the Homeland, or as rarely as she could. She still had dreams about it—though, strangely, these dreams did not focus on the worst things that had happened to her there. Mostly they were dreams of feeling hungry and cold and helpless, or the endlessly turning wheels of the grinder in the biodiesel plant. Sometimes she was simply looking at her hands with a feeling of perplexity, as if trying to remember something she was supposed to be holding; from time to time she dreamed about Jackie, the old woman who had befriended her, or else Lila, for whom Sara’s complex feelings had distilled over time to a kind of sorrowful sympathy. Once in a while, her dreams were flat-out nightmares—she was carrying Kate in blinding snow, the two of them being chased by something terrible—but these had abated. So that was one more thing to be thankful for: eventually, perhaps not soon but someday, the Homeland would become just one more memory in a life of memories, an unpleasant recollection that made the others all the sweeter.

Hollis was already out cold. The man slept like a fallen giant; his head hit the pillow, and soon he was snoring away. Sara extinguished the candle and slid beneath the covers. She wondered if Marie had delivered her baby yet, and if she was still yelling at her husband; she thought of the Jiménez family and the look on Carlos’s face as he lifted baby Grace into his arms. Maybe
grace
was the word she was looking for. It was possible they’d still get flagged by the census office, but Sara didn’t think so. Not with so many babies being born. Which was the thing. That was the heart of the matter. A new world was coming; a new world was already here. Maybe that was what getting older taught you, when you looked in the mirror and saw the passage of time in your face, when you looked at your sleeping daughter and saw the girl you once were and would never be again. The world was real and you were in it, a brief part but still a part, and if you were lucky, and maybe even if you weren’t, the things you’d done for love would be remembered.

6

The sky over Houston released the night slowly, darkness easing to gray. Greer made his way into the city. Where the Katy Freeway met the 610 in a tangle of collapsed ramps and overpasses, he arced north, away from the bayous and swamps, with their sucking mud and impenetrable foliage, bypassing the liquefied inner neighborhoods for higher ground, then followed a wide avenue of junked cars south to the downtown lagoon.

The rowboat was where he’d left it two months ago. Greer tied up his horse, dumped out the mosquito-infested rainwater, and dragged the craft to the water’s edge. Across the lagoon, the
Chevron Mariner
lay at its improbable angle, a great temple of rust and rot lodged among the listing towers of the city’s central core. He laid his supplies in the bottom of the boat, set it afloat, and rowed away from shore.

In the lobby of One Allen Center, he tied off at the base of the escalators and ascended, the duffel bag with its sloshing contents slung over his shoulder. The ten-story climb through mold-befouled air left him dizzy and short of breath. In the empty office, he pulled up the rope he’d left in place and lowered the bag to the deck of the
Mariner,
then climbed down behind it.

He always fed Carter first.

On the port side, just about amidships, a hatch lay flush with the deck. Greer knelt beside it and removed the jugs of blood from the bag. He tied three together by their handles with one of the ropes. The sun was angled behind him, raking the deck with light. With a heavy wrench he unscrewed the safety bolts, turned the handle, and opened the hatch.

A shaft of sunshine spilled into the space below. Carter lay curled in a fetal position near the forward bulkhead, his body in shadow, away from the light. Old jugs and coils of rope were piled in a heap on the floor. Hand over hand, Greer lowered the jugs. Only when they reached bottom did Carter stir. As he scuttled on all fours toward the blood, Greer released the rope, closed the hatch, and replaced the safety bolts.

Now, Amy.

Greer moved to the second hatch. The trick was to move fast but not with panicked recklessness. The scent of blood: for Amy, it could not be contained by something as meager as the thin plastic membrane of the jugs; her hunger was too strong. Greer set his supplies within quick reach, unwrenched the bolts, and placed them to the side. A deep breath to calm his nerves; then he opened the hatch.

Blood.

She leapt. Lucius dropped the jugs, slammed the hatch, and shoved the first bolt into place as Amy’s body made contact. The metal clanged as if hit by a giant hammer. He threw his body across it; another blow came, knocking the wind from his chest. The hinges were bending; unless he could get the remaining bolts in place, the hatch wouldn’t hold. He’d managed to get two more into their holes when Amy struck again; Greer watched helplessly as one of the bolts jogged free and rolled across the deck. His hand stabbed outward and seized it at the very edge of his reach.

“Amy,” he yelled, “it’s me! It’s Lucius!” He shoved the bolt into place and smacked it with the head of the wrench, driving it home. “The blood is there! Follow the scent of the blood!”

Three turns on the wrench and the bolt locked down, bringing the fourth hole back into alignment. He rammed its bolt into place. One last pound on the underside of the hatch, halfhearted; then it was over.

Lucius, I didn’t mean it … 

“It’s all right,” he said.

I’m sorry … 

He picked up his tools and put them in the empty duffel. Below him, in the hold of the
Chevron Mariner,
Amy and Carter were drinking their fills. It always happened like this; Greer should have been used to it by now. Yet his heart was pounding, his mind and body flying with adrenaline.

“I’m yours, Amy,” he said. “I always will be. Whatever comes, you know that.”

And with these words, Lucius made his way across the deck of the
Mariner
and climbed back through the window.

7

Amy returned to awareness to find herself on all fours in the dirt. Her hands were gloved; a plastic flat of impatiens rested on the ground close by and, beside it, a rusty trowel.

“You all right there, Miss Amy?”

Carter was sitting on the patio, legs akimbo beneath the wrought-iron table, fanning his face with his big straw hat. On the table were two glasses of iced tea.

“That man takes good care of us,” he said, and sighed with satisfaction. “Haven’t eaten my fill like that since I don’t remember when.”

Amy rose unsteadily to her feet. A deep lassitude enveloped her, as if she had just awoken from a long nap.

“Come and sit a minute,” Carter said. “Give the body a chance to digest. Feeding day like a day off round here. Them flowers can wait.”

Which was true; there were always more flowers. As soon as Amy finished planting a flat, a new one would appear by the gate. It was the same with the tea: one minute the table was bare; in the next, two sweating glasses awaited. By what unseen agency these things arrived, Amy did not know. It was all part of this place and its own particular logic. Every day a season, every season a year.

She removed her gloves and crossed the lawn to sit across from Carter. The greasy taste of blood lingered in her mouth. She sipped the tea to clear it away.

“It’s good to keep your strength up, Miss Amy,” Carter said. “Ain’t no prize for starving yourself.”

“I just don’t … like it.” She looked at Carter, who was still fanning himself with his hat. “I tried to kill him again.”

“Lucius knows the situation well enough. I doubt he takes it personal.”

“That’s not the point, Anthony. I need to learn to control it the way you do.”

Carter frowned. He was a man of compact expression, small gestures, thoughtful pauses. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You ain’t had but three years to get used to things. You still just a baby in the way of being what we are.”

“I don’t feel like a baby.”

“What you feel like then?”

“A monster.”

She’d spoken too sharply; she glanced away, feeling ashamed. After feeding, she always passed through a period of doubt. How strange it all was: she was a body in a ship, but her mind lived here, with Carter, among the plants and flowers. Only when Lucius brought the blood did these two worlds touch each other, and the contrast was disorienting. Carter had explained that this place was nothing particular to the two of them; the difference was that they could see it. There was one world, of flesh and blood and bone, but also another—a deeper reality that ordinary people could glimpse only fleetingly, if at all. A world of souls, both the living and the dead, in which time and space, memory and desire, existed in a purely fluid state, the way they did in dreams.

Amy knew this to be so. She felt as if she’d always known it—that even as a little girl, a purely
human
girl, she had sensed the existence of this other realm, this world-behind-the-world, as she had come to call it. She supposed that many children did the same. What was childhood if not a passage from light to dark, of the soul’s slow drowning in an ocean of ordinary matter? During her time in the
Chevron Mariner,
a great deal of the past had become clear. Vivid recollections had inched their way back to her, approaching on memory’s delicate feet, until things that had happened ages past felt like recent occurrences. She recalled a time, long ago, in the innocent period she thought of as “before”—before Lacey and Wolgast, before Project N
OAH
, before the Oregon mountaintop where they had made their home and then her long, solo wanderings in a peopleless world with only the virals for company—when animals had spoken to her. Larger animals, like dogs, but also smaller ones that nobody paid attention to—birds and even insects. She’d thought nothing of this at the time; it was simply the way things were. Nor did it trouble her that nobody else seemed to hear them; it was part of the world’s arrangement that the animals spoke only to her, always addressing her by name, as if they were old friends, telling her stories about their lives, and it made her happy to be the recipient of the special gift of their attention when so much else in her life seemed to make no sense at all: her mother’s lurching emotions and long absences, their drifting from place to place, the strangers that came and went with no apparent purpose.