During the drive, Melia replayed every moment of the conversation with Theo a dozen times, filling in all of the I-should-have-saids with bitter rhetoric. By the time she arrived at the Seven Seas Salt Factory, she was ready to bite someone. The receptionist at the front desk only gave her a half smile as Melia stormed past.
Her dad looked up from the dehydrator lamp he was adjusting when she burst onto the factory floor. He raised his eyebrows. “How’s Theo?”
“He grabbed Nikolas’s hand!” Melia crossed her arms holding in the desire to hit something. “Lot’s Wife! He knows Nikolas hates to be touched.”
Sighing, her dad screwed the cover back over the lamp. “We can go back to court if you want to try for sole custody again.”
“If I thought it would do any good, I would, but he’ll just put on another show of how much he loves his children.”
“It’s good for them to spend time with their father.”
“Is it?” She glared into the shallow pan of water under the heat lamp. A mosaic of crystalline salt shimmered down the length of the pan, except under this lamp.
Her dad cleared his throat. “Feel up to a blind tasting before you leave?”
“Sure.”
Dad was trying to distract her, and Melia was more than willing to get Theo off her mind. Her dad led her up to the tasting room and set three tiny dishes of salt in front of her.
Moistening the end of a toothpick in neutral water, she dipped it in the first plate, catching some of the crystalline grains on the end. Melia touched her tongue to the salt and closed her eyes. “Sweet, with a little bit of a caramelized quality, nuances of . . . tobacco?” She opened her eyes. “Pure human reclaimed?”
Her dad was grinning at her, so she must be right. “Go on. Try the next.”
She got a clean toothpick and sampled the next plate. “Oooo . . . this is that new salt lick in the South Valley, isn’t it? I like the traces of magnesium you’re leaving in. Very tangy.”
He was bouncing on his toes with pride at her palette. “And our final sample?”
At the first taste, Melia frowned. A bitter aftertaste clung to her tongue. “Potassium chloride. Oh, come on, Dad. Don’t tell me you’re going to start blending too.”
“You liked the magnesium.”
“That’s because it retains the terroir, the essential characteristics of the place the salt came from. This? This is just polluting it for profit.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. So go find a new source for us.”
“I do my best.”
The plants of New Gaea rose to staggering heights around Melia. Unlike the lowlands surrounding Delfie City, this part of the continent had ferns that would have seemed at home in the Cretaceous period back on Earth. The giant fernwood trees dripped in the constant humidity and smelled of spicy loam. She had searched most of the last week, piloting the rover between the trunks, but she had yet to find a new source of sodium.
Her salt-suit stuck to her skin as the sweat just sat on her body. Some of the fernwoods from this region had shown faint traces of sodium blight. She had hoped it was a sign of a deposit, but it looked like nothing more than a groundwater leach from an earlier colonist’s graveyard. After four hundred years, the bodies would not retain enough sodium to make exhuming them worth the furor from the historical societies.
If she could find even sodium carbonate, she could extract the sodium in the lab and then combine it with chlorine to make salt.
Her phone rang with a recording of Dora’s laughter. For a moment it seemed as if her daughter had stepped into the fern forest with her. She toggled it on, glancing down to see her dad’s icon. She grinned. He couldn’t stand being back in the factory.
“What’s up?”
“Melia—” His voice shook like an old, old man. “How long will it take you to come home?”
“What’s wrong?” Her heart stopped. “Is it Mom?”
“Theo just called. Nikolas and Dora are in the hospital.”
The soil sampler dropped from her hand. Melia pressed the earpiece deeper into her ear as she turned to the rover. “What—?” What happened? What do you mean? What did he do to my children? “What’s wrong with them?”
“I don’t know. They’ve been vomiting, so he’s been keeping them in bed, but this morning he couldn’t get Dora to wake up.”
Melia felt cold. “And Nikolas?” The rover recognized her as she approached and opened its door.
Her dad was silent for a moment. “We aren’t sure. He won’t talk, and stares at the wall, but . . . that’s normal.”
“No, it’s not.” Melia bit the words off as she backed the rover out of the clearing. She left her tools lying under the dripping canopy of ferns. “He has a routine; if he doesn’t follow it, something is very, very wrong.” Theo should have called her the moment they got sick.
She could hear her mom’s voice in the background asking Dad a question. Melia should have left the kids with Mom. She would have sent status reports every half hour.
Her dad said, “Your mother wants to know when you’ll be home.”
“Closest main road is L-90. I’m a good six hours away from that. Late tonight. Early tomorrow.”
“Tell me the closest town, and I’ll send an aero to get you.”
Melia could not breathe for the bubble of fear pressed against her throat. They could not be dying. She swallowed. “Campsol. Have it meet me at Campsol.”
The aero that met her was automated. In the silence of the cabin, Melia’s fear screamed around her. Why hadn’t Theo called her? He should have called her. Please let them be all right. Why hadn’t Theo called her when they got sick?
The phone rang once during the flight, laughing with Dora’s voice. She shut her eyes, without answering it, and listened to Dora laugh. She could do nothing to get there faster, and as long as she didn’t know better, her children were alive.
Let me be on time.
When the aero landed on the roof of the hospital, her dad was waiting for her by the lift, hunched over. He looked old.
Melia flung herself out of the aero and ran to him. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her close. She buried her face in his shoulder, as if he could still fix everything.
He stroked her hair. “I’m so sorry.”
Melia trembled, rejecting the reasons for his apology. There were other things he could be sorry about. He was sorry she had to come back for a false alarm. He was sorry she was upset. He was—
“Dora didn’t make it.”
He was wrong.
She had heard Dora laughing on the aero. How could a little girl who laughed like that be gone? It wasn’t possible.
He said other things to her as they rode the lift down. Melia nodded whenever he paused; his words were almost meaningless. “Salt overdose . . . Theo thinks the kids might have thought the supplements were Salties . . . Dora’s so much smaller…”
A long tunnel seemed to be between her and the outside. Was that what it was like for Nikolas?
Nikolas.
“How is Nikolas?”
Her dad stopped with his mouth open. He had been speaking, but she had no memory of what he had just said. He cleared his throat. “The doctors say he’ll be fine. They were worried about brain damage, but think he’s out of the woods.”
Brain damage. As if her sweet boy didn’t have enough to cope with.
The lift opened on a lobby filled with people. It seemed as if her entire extended family was there. Theo’s grandmother sat in a corner next to Melia’s aunt. They were holding hands, with their heads bent together. Theo’s grandmother held a tearsheet under her eyes, delicately catching each tear that streamed down her face. Was she going to make a huge show of how much salt she collected for the memorial service?
The conversations stopped as people saw her. A cousin took a step forward, but Melia’s dad shook his head, waving him off. She wanted to thank him for that, but her tongue had frozen in her mouth.
He led her down the hall to a private room. Thank God her children had a room of their own.
The room was dimly lit. Her mom turned as they entered. The lines in her face seemed deeper than Melia remembered. At her side, the hospital bed seemed to swallow Nikolas.
Melia’s heart twisted. His face was puffy and slick with sweat. The sheets under him were damp. His eyes were closed. His right hand fluttered against the sheet in the pattern he made for distress.
What had happened to her son?
Theo stepped between her and Nikolas.
The tunnel protecting her shattered. All of the anger she had swallowed boiled up and over. Theo had killed her child.
She launched herself at Theo, swinging her fists wildly, beyond words. He had taken her children from her. Dora was dead. It was his fault. His fault. “What did you do to them?”
Theo tried to catch her hands. “I didn’t do anything!”
Over his shoulder she saw Nikolas. His eyes were open and he was watching them.
Melia dropped her hands.
She pushed past Theo. Nikolas looked at the ceiling when she got to the side of his bed. He hummed through his nose and his right hand beat against the bed.
She wanted to hold his hand, to brush the hair back from his forehead, but she clutched the rail on the edge of the bed so hard that her fingers ached.
“Nikolas?”
He closed his eyes.
He must blame her for not protecting him.
“Melia,” Theo said, “I don’t know what happened.”
She held on to the side of the bed. She had lost it once, but she would not do that again in front of her child. Her only child. She held her breath till the possibility of sobs passed. Breathing shallowly, fighting for her voice, Melia said, “I would like some time with my son.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, like Nikolas, and listened to the murmurs around her. Theo’s mother sounded as offended as always, but his father seemed to understand. She waited until the last footstep left the room and the door closed.
Then she opened her eyes. Nikolas’s eyes were still closed, but his hand had stopped beating its rhythm on the sheets. She took that as a sign of forgiveness.
The extraction room at Seven Seas was intimate, dominated by the flushing machine. Beyond the window in the extraction room door, Melia could see the main factory floor. The workers appeared to go about their business, but she kept catching them as they looked away from her.
She turned back to Dora. The hospital had pumped Dora full of fluids as they tried to restore her electrolyte balance, leaving her skin swollen like a water balloon. Even so, her tiny body looked lost in the flushing machine.
Melia found herself wanting to look for the sweatband, which Dora must have thrown on the floor. She brushed Dora’s hair back from her forehead.
Picking up the first of the tubes she needed to flush the salt from her daughter’s body, she held the sharp metal tip of the siphon over the artery in Dora’s thigh. She had reclaimed the salt from hundreds of bodies, but her mind balked at pushing the siphon into her daughter.
Melia turned slightly so she couldn’t see Dora’s face, so that the body in the flushing machine looked like any other. She placed the needle again. And stopped. This was still wrong. She had wanted to be the one to extract her daughter’s salt; she wasn’t here to extract a stranger’s.
Looking at Dora’s face, she pushed down on the siphon. It slipped into Dora’s thigh with a slight pop. Melia watched Dora’s face for any sign of a flinch, even though she knew there would be nothing.
She picked up the flush tube. Her hands were shaking, but she pushed it into a vein in Dora’s other thigh. A little of the tension eased at the back of Melia’s throat to have that accomplished.
Her little girl was on her way back to the great salt sea where life began.
Melia turned the machine on. As the pumps began to flush Dora’s body, washing the salt from her veins and bones, Melia sank into a chair against the wall. She rocked slightly as she listened to the pump hum.
Melia’s house was too quiet. She kept feeling like Dora was just in another room, napping. She had to turn off the newsfeeds because she kept seeing Dora’s name. The media could not let go of the extravagance of her death by salt overdose.
The morning of Dora’s memorial service, Melia poked her head into the kitchen to tell Nikolas’s sitter that she was leaving. His plate was on the table, with the vegetables cut exactly the way he liked them, but the room was empty.
Wrong. Something was wrong when he broke his routine. She called him, knowing he wouldn’t answer, but hoping.
“He’s up here, ma’am.”
Following the sitter’s voice to the front door, Melia found Nikolas, rocking slightly. The sitter stood beside him, shifting uncomfortably, so she seemed to rock with Nikolas.
Melia took a breath to brace herself for the fireworks that would go off about the break in his routine. This was not the right time of day for her to be leaving the house. This was his lunch time.
The sitter said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I know we should be having lunch, but he won’t come.”
Melia crouched next to Nikolas. “Do you need something?”
He turned his face slightly closer to her, but still didn’t meet her gaze. His right hand fluttered in his distressed rhythm. He licked his lips before whispering, “Dora.”
Melia waited a moment to see if he would say anything else, then asked, “Do you want to go to her memorial service with me?” She had not been sure that he understood or even noticed that Dora was gone.
Nikolas jerked his head once in a quick nod, still looking sideways at the wall.
“All right, then.”
She led him down to the garage, keeping a careful distance from him. Nikolas was silent on the way to the memorial service, not even rocking as they drove through the streets. The road in front of the chapel was thronged with tourists and paparazzi anxious for news about the Salt Baron’s granddaughter.
The security system recognized Melia’s vehicle and passed her through the barricades. She went around the car to let Nikolas out. When she opened the door, he slipped out to stand quietly on the pavement next to her. In the throng of people, Nikolas huddled closer to her than he usually stood to anyone. Melia chewed on the inside of her lip. The crowd could overwhelm him. “Nikolas, you tell me when you need to leave, all right?”
He didn’t answer, but she rarely got a response to that question. He might, just might, grunt before melting down.
As they went inside, the people surrounding them all had tearsheets under their eyes catching tears for Dora. Melia wondered which ones were really shedding tears, and which had bought pre-salined sheets to demonstrate their shared grief.
The reclaimer by the entrance to the chapel was already full of the tearsheets.
Every person she passed seemed to want to clutch her hand and express the same banal condolences as the person before. Melia kept nodding and thanking them for their thoughts, but her attention was on Nikolas. She diverted the people who wanted to pat him on the head, but could do little to protect him from the closeness of the crowd as they worked their way across the lobby. Her dad saw her and arrowed through the crowd to shepherd them across to the private family waiting room.
He stopped outside the door. “Theo is inside.”
“I won’t say anything.”
He squeezed her arm once before opening the door.
At first, she only saw her mom and grandma. Her mother looked as if she had been crying off and on for days. Grandma was patting her hand.
Theo’s father stood up when she came in. Mr. Lathouris’s eyes were as red as her mom’s. He had a wad of tearsheets in his hand, and she had no doubt that he had saturated them all himself; he had always been so good with the children.
Nikolas screamed.
He had his hands over his ears and was staring at Theo.
“What the—?” Theo flung his han
ds out in exasperation. “Why did you bring him?”
“He wanted to come.”
“That’s great, Melia. What did he do, tap it out in code?”
Melia ground her teeth together to keep the silence she had promised her dad. She knelt between Nikolas and Theo, hoping that cutting into his line of sight would help. “Nikolas? Do you want a Salti?”
He jerked his head in a no and continued to wail.
Nikolas had never been frightened of Theo before. What had changed?
“Shut him up! People can hear him.”
“Theo!” Mr. Lathouris took his son by the arm and pulled him to the side, whispering angrily.
Theo jerked his arm free of his father’s grasp. “For Pete’s sake, I’m not staying here to listen to this.” He stalked to the door and spun dramatically to glare at Melia. “Make sure he’s better behaved than this when I come pick him up.” Before she could respond, he slammed out the door.
Nikolas’s screams cut off the moment the door closed.
Melia stared at him and then at the door. Mr. Lathouris apologized for Theo but Melia barely heard him. What was Nikolas trying to tell her?
“Melia, it’s time to go in.” Her dad crouched down next to them. “Is he going to be all right?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know what set that off.” She turned to look up at Theo’s parents. “Why don’t you all go in, and I’ll stay out with Nikolas.”
Mr. Lathouris said, “I think Theo has probably gone home.”
Melia tried to smile at him. He knew his son well. Even if Theo wanted to come into the funeral, he wouldn’t be able to back down from his dramatic exit. “Nikolas? Do you want to go in to the memorial service?”
He nodded.
When she stood up, Nikolas followed her to the door like cattle to a salt lick.
She went through the motions of the service with the rest of the family and went to the rail when the priest held out the weeping cup. Melia took a sip of the saline, holding the sweetness of her daughter’s salt in her mouth.
The flushing machine had recovered much more salt than she had expected from Dora. How had her little girl ingested that much salt?
Word Puppets Page 22