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Para mis sobrinos Isaac y Navarro
PART ONE
SELECTED
1
The Envoy tossed itself at the world.
An ambassador’s business had left it stranded on the moon for years and decades. During all that time it tried to patch together a return capsule from Soviet equipment abandoned on the surface. But this had never actually worked, and now it needed to hurry, so it gave up on the capsule and built a cannon instead. Then the Envoy aimed itself and its cannon at the world.
This was not the tricky part.
Moving through vacuum for several days was not the tricky part either. The Envoy had no ship, no craft, no transportation. It had only itself: the spherical, purple transparency of its own substance. It clenched its outer layers, becoming glass-like to bounce radiation away and keep itself from dehydrating. But it remained clear enough to let light in. All of it was sensitive to light. It was its own big, purple eyeball. The Envoy watched the approaching planet with all of itself, and enjoyed the view.
The nightside of the globe grew large ahead. Constellations of bright and artificial light stretched out across landmasses. The Envoy expected to land in Russia again, or possibly in China, but North America stretched out below it.
The first hints of atmosphere scraped against its skin. The Envoy winced. This was going to hurt. This would be the tricky part.
The Envoy became a blind eye, opaque, closing itself and all its senses. The view was about to become too searingly bright to appreciate. Air turned to plasma against the friction of the Envoy’s passage.
It shed several layers of scorched self. Then it slowed down by expanding, thinning its substance against air currents like the stretched skin of a flying squirrel or a flying fish or a flying squid. It became its own parachute—though it didn’t slow down nearly as much as a real parachute would have. The Envoy tumbled into a rough glide. It became transparent again, letting light pass through it, trying to see where it was going and what it was falling toward. It failed to see very much.
The Envoy smacked into a small pond in an urban park. The noise and splash startled several geese, ducks, catfish, and turtles.
It sank into the mud and muck at the very bottom and felt itself gradually cool, losing the sting of impact. It needed time to collect itself—though not literally, for which it was grateful. Its substance remained in one single piece.
A few curious fish tried to nibble the Envoy. It tried to ignore them. Then it made a limb and shoed them away. Finally it stretched out and relearned how to swim. It had been a long time since the Envoy had lived in an aquatic environment, but now it remembered how to wave and ripple like a manta ray. It swam up to the surface of the pond. There it carefully observed the shore, the surrounding park, and the playgrounds.
The Envoy spent many days floating and recovering from planetfall before it noticed Gabriel Sandro Fuentes.
2
Gabe sat on a swing and watched his toddler siblings, Andrés and Noemi.
Noemi sat underneath a plastic slide and poured handfuls of sand over her sandals. Andrés, her twin brother, climbed up and down the stairs that led to the slide. He didn’t actually like the slide itself, but he loved going up and down the stairs. They both seemed focused and content with what they were doing.
Gabe kept a close eye on them anyway.
The chains of his swing creaked like door hinges as he swayed back and forth. His friend Frankie sat in the other swing and complained. Gabe was dark and shorter than his average peer, while Frankie was pale, tall, and spindly thin.
“Why do you have to babysit today?” Frankie asked.
“It’s Thursday,” Gabe answered, as though that explained everything.
“So?” said Frankie.
“So Mom tutors on Thursdays. I can’t remember what subject she’s got today. Might be Spanish. Might be math. I hope it isn’t standardized test prep. She hates test prep. And my sister has a restaurant shift, and then Dad has his own shift later. He’s making dinner now. So that leaves me to watch the twins.”
“Huh,” said Frankie—the uncomprehending grunt of an only child who has never had to watch anyone else. “I wish I could come over for dinner. I’d rather have your dad’s cooking than eat with my mom while she glares at me.”
“You can’t, though,” said Gabe. “We’re supposed to be avoiding each other right now.”
“Yeah,” Frankie said sadly.
The other kids playing nearby were either very much younger or very much older than Gabe and Frankie. Two older boys played basketball in a court adjacent to the playground. They shouted and cursed each other out. It sounded angry. It sounded vicious. Gabe glanced their way whenever an especially sharp curse cut the air. But it didn’t look like they were fighting. Not really. So it was probably just aggressive conversation. The cursing might have been part of their game.
Gabe looked back at the twins. Noemi still sat under the slide with her handfuls of sand. Andrés kept climbing the stairs.
“My mom is pretty mad,” said Frankie. “Have you noticed how she seems to get taller whenever she gets mad?”
Gabe nodded without looking away from the twins. He had noticed. Frankie’s mom turned into a towering statue of wrathful ice whenever she got mad.
“She’s sending me to live with my dad for the rest of the summer,” Frankie went on. “In California.”
That got Gabe’s attention. “Really?”
“Really,” said Frankie. “She puts me on a plane tonight.”
“Tonight?” This was a terrible thing. Frankie was Gabe’s only friend within walking distance. They usually spent whole summers together—except for the summers Frankie spent with his dad. And this summer wasn’t supposed to be one of those. “So we don’t have time to talk her out of it?” He tried to think of apologies and promises that might somehow appease Frankie’s mom.
“Don’t try to talk her out of it,” said Frankie. “Really. Don’t. It won’t work. And at least in California I won’t have to see her glare at me for a while.” He kicked the sand under his swing with one foot. “I think we got the fuel mix wrong.”
“I think we shouldn’t have used a metal pipe,” Gabe told him. “Model rockets are usually paper and plastic. Lightweight. They cause less damage when they hit things. And they’re less likely to just fall over, spin in place, and spew flames.”
“But the pipe looked like it wanted to be a rocket, just sitting there in the garage,” Frankie said. “It was all shiny. Like it dreamed of becoming a rocket rather than a piece of plumbing. Anyway, thanks for saying it was your idea.”
“You’re welcome,” said Gabe.
“It kind of was your idea,” said Frankie.
“No, it wasn’t,” said Gabe. “Did any of the lawn furniture survive?”
“None of it,” said Frankie, his voice morose.
“Is lawn furniture expensive?” Gabe asked, a bit worried.
“Probably,” said Frankie. “I think she plans to take it out of us in leaf-raking and snow-shoveling later. But right now she doesn’t want to see either of us, so she’s banishing me to California. She’ll probably just ignore you if she sees you around. Were your parents mad?”
“Sort of,” said Gabe. “Dad tried to be, but he kept laughing. Mom was angrier, but mostly she was just reliev
ed we didn’t die.”
He watched Noemi sift sand. Then he looked for Andrés and noticed that Andrés was no longer climbing stairs.
Gabe couldn’t see him. He scanned the various small children, looking for a familiar one. He stood up from his swing, still searching, ready to run but not yet sure which direction to run in.
Noemi still sat under the slide.
Andrés didn’t seem to be anywhere.
Then Gabe found him, finally. The toddler had left the playground, stepped onto the grass, and approached a very old woman sitting on a park bench. The old woman glared at the playground. She watched the children play as though planning to eat them all.
Andrés toddled right up to her as if he meant to offer himself as a sacrificial meal to spare the other kids. He stood and stared at the old woman. She stared right back at him. Neither moved or spoke until Gabe swooped in, scooped him up, and gave a quick apology.
The old lady turned her mighty glare on Gabe. He flinched, retreated to the sandy playground, and put Andrés down.
The toddler immediately headed for a trio of girls building sand castles with shovels and buckets. He snatched away one of their shovels when he got there.
“Hey!” the shovel-owner shouted. She seemed old enough to have a sense of ownership, but too young to realize that Andrés didn’t. Gabe moved to intercept. Then several things happened very quickly.
Gabe picked up Andrés and plucked the plastic shovel from his hand.
Andrés let out an indignant squawk.
The older boys on the basketball court gave a warning shout.
Their ball flew away from the court in a high arc headed for the middle of the sand castles.
Before it could land and destroy all the sandy buildings in its path, Gabe kicked the ball like a soccer goalie. It sailed away from the kids, away from the castles, and back toward the basketball court. He did this while still holding the squawking Andrés. Then he took a breath and smiled, proud of his reflexes and also a little surprised.
One of the older boys cursed Gabe out for kicking their ball—one shouldn’t ever kick a basketball, apparently—and the other grinned and shouted thanks. Gabe waved to both of them as though they had said the same thing, and maybe they had.
He returned the plastic shovel to the castle-building girl, who took it as her rightful due and went back to work. Then Gabe put Andrés down and checked to make sure that Noemi was still under the slide.
She wasn’t. She was running away from the playground, downhill and toward the duck pond. She laughed the shrieking laugh of forbidden freedom.
“Your baby sister’s making a break for it,” Frankie said, helpfully pointing at Noemi but not moving otherwise.
Gabe hoisted Andrés back up again, dropped him into an infant swing to contain him, and sprinted after his sister.
He caught her at the very edge of the pond.
“Splashy!” she yelled while Gabe marched her back up the hill. “Splashy, splashy! Ducks! Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks! Meow!”
“Ducks say ‘quack,’ ” Gabe told her.
“Meeeeeoooooow!”
They got back to Andrés, who was trapped in his swing and crying. That set off Noemi, so Gabe pushed them both in the swings for a bit until they cheered up.
“That was smooth,” said Frankie, who hadn’t budged from his own swing the whole time. “That was ninja-like.”
“Thanks,” said Gabe. He wanted to point out that Frankie could have helped rather than just sitting there and watching, but he didn’t bother.
“I’d still rather be a pirate than a ninja,” said Frankie.
They argued about that for a while. It was an old argument between them. Gabe would rather be quiet and precise than boisterous, loud, and sloppy. He preferred throwing stars to cannon fire. But Frankie liked to be loud.
Gabe strapped the twins into their double stroller once they were both laughing and happy. Each seat had a five-point harness, as though the stroller were secretly a space capsule.
“Time to go home,” he said. He didn’t want to go. The afternoon had suddenly become the very end of Gabe and Frankie’s shared summer. But it was still time.
“I guess so,” said Frankie.
“You’ll have fun in California,” said Gabe, trying to put the best spin on it—even though he was still disappointed and grumpy about the whole thing. That rocket-pipe had been a dumb idea all around, but Gabe had gone along, taken the blame for it afterward, and now faced a friendless summer. He shouldn’t have let Frankie light that fuse.
“Sure,” said Frankie without enthusiasm. “I’ll have fun.”
They argued about Batman and Zorro while they walked home. Lately they had taken to watching old Batman cartoons and older Zorro cartoons online at Frankie’s house. Both cartoon heroes were rich gentlemen who wore masks, hid in caves, and named themselves after stealthy animals—but otherwise they were completely different.
“So which one would win in a fight?” Frankie wanted to know.
“They wouldn’t ever get into a fight,” said Gabe. He said it quietly, as a known and simple fact.
“But what if they did?” Frankie asked, his voice very much louder.
“They wouldn’t fight,” Gabe repeated. “It wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen.”
“What if they fought by mistake?” Frankie pressed him. “Maybe one of them was framed, or hypnotized, or possessed by evil alien ghosts, or something like that?”
“Zorro would still find a way to avoid it,” said Gabe. “Batman would come at him all brooding and serious, and Zorro would just say something charming, or else make him laugh, and then the fight would be over before it even started because you can’t crack up laughing and still be Batman. Zorro would make a game out of it.”
“If Batman got possessed by aliens, then the aliens wouldn’t care about Zorro’s sense of humor,” Frankie pointed out. “None of Zorro’s jokes would make sense to aliens.”
“You can’t say for sure what would make sense to aliens,” said Gabe. “And Zorro would parry anything Batman threw at him. He’d duck and weave and snap batarangs out of the air with his whip. Also, batarang is a dumb word. How could anyone who carries a belt full of batarangs take themselves so seriously?”
Frankie’s voice got even louder. “I can’t hear you over the sound of how wrong you are. It’s deafening. Your wrongness.”
They stopped at a street corner. Gabe needed to turn left to get home. Frankie’s place was off to the right.
“Don’t burn anything at your dad’s,” Gabe told him. “You’ll probably start a whole forest fire out there. If I turn on the news and all of California’s burning, I’ll know it’s your fault.”
“Don’t have fun without me,” said Frankie. “No fun.”
“I probably won’t,” said Gabe.
They did their secret handshake, which was complicated. Then both of them went home.
The Envoy moved low to the ground between hedges and trees, still dripping with pond water. Gabe didn’t notice it following him.
3
Gabe’s house was a duplex. His family rented half of it. No one lived in the other half. The landlord planned to fix it up this summer, but Gabe hadn’t seen any sign of him lately. The landlord wasn’t really one for fixing things.
Gabe climbed the back steps with a twin under each arm. He nudged open their screen door with his toe and went inside.
His father was in the kitchen, making chicken curry tamales—a fusion of Mexican and Indian cooking—with mango chutney and a mole sauce of his own magnificent invention.
Both of Gabe’s parents were tapatíos—meaning they came from Guadalajara, Mexico—but they met each other in India. His mother Isabelle was a student at the time. His father Octavio wasn’t. He couldn’t ever stay in classrooms for long. He spent his time riding a motorcycle named Baghera across the subcontinent, swapping recipes in every town and working as a chef in exchange for rooms to sleep in. Isabelle studied a
rcheology and went to India to dig around in ancient ruins, even though there were excellent opportunities to dig up ancient ruins without having to leave Mexico—or even go far outside Guadalajara. Her parents had pointed this out to her at the time. She just smiled, nodded, and left anyway. She met Gabe’s father on the other side of the world, and they were married by the time they got back.
Now Gabe’s dad worked in professional kitchens, but he hated the efficiency that restaurant work required of him. At home he was inefficient. He used as many pots and pans as he possibly could, and changed his mind often about what he was actually cooking. His spice rack—which used to be a bookshelf—took up much of the kitchen. He kept each distinct sort of spice in an unlabeled jam jar and needed four jars to hold all the cumin. Somehow he still knew what was what.
Tonight Gabe’s father cooked while singing classic Bollywood tunes.
Gabe strapped each twin into a high chair and buckled their seat belts to prevent escape.
“You’ve got them?” he asked, passing the child-care torch to his father and making sure that he noticed it was happening.
His father nodded and set two small bowls of tasty glop aside to cool.
“Yeeeeeeeeh dostieeeeeeeee, hum nahieeeeeeeeee todengeeeeeeee,” he sang, stirring the various pots that bubbled over the stove. He tested the curry temperature with his pinky finger, found it suitable for toddlers, and set the two bowls on the two high-chair trays. The twins both sank their hands into the thick glop and stuffed their faces.
Gabe grabbed a Coke from the fridge—a Mexican Coke, made with cane sugar rather than corn syrup. All the local supermarkets and grocery stores imported Mexican Coca-Cola in small glass bottles. The newer, American stuff tasted like sweetened battery acid. Superior soda in hand, Gabe fled from his father’s singing and headed upstairs.
His bedroom contained a bed, a bookshelf, and all three family pets.
Zora the parrot circled Gabe’s head a couple of times before landing on it. Then she walked back and forth as though patrolling the top of a medieval tower. Gabe winced as the small claws pricked his scalp, but he didn’t brush her off.
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