by Edward Aubry
"Harry?" Glimmer was perched on the back of a male centaur, apparently quite comfortable. In the presence of her own (magical) kind, she obviously felt no need for the Barbie clothes. "I thought you wanted to be alone."
"I thought so too," he said. "Turns out I was wrong. Put your poodle skirt back on. We're going to get the kids."
* * *
School had let out by the time they got back to the city, so they went straight to the Adoption Shelter. Neither of the children were in their rooms. It took a few minutes to locate them in the lounge. Mitchell was watching a DVD with a dozen other kids. Dorothy, sitting by a window and reading a novel, was the first to see Harrison walk in the door.
"Harrison!" she shouted. She took a moment to carefully mark her place with an index card, then jumped up and ran into his arms.
"Glimmer!" Mitchell shouted. He jumped up from his movie and ran to the pixie. Uncertain whether, or how, to hug her, he settled for staring at her.
Dorothy looked up from hugging Harrison. "Glimmer? You're not dead!"
"I'm not dead," the pixie confirmed.
From that point, the children stumbled over each other piling questions on Harrison. The only one that came through intelligibly was, "Where have you been?" from Mitchell. That was the one he had no intention of answering right away, however, so he shushed them both.
"Listen," he said. "I have a job now, and we all have a place to live together. It's a hotel room with a little kitchen. It's going to be a tight squeeze, but it's nice."
"Are we moving right now?" Dorothy asked.
"Not on a school night," he said. "We're going to wait until the weekend and do it right. Meanwhile, I can spend evenings with you. How does that sound?"
"Does this mean you're our dad now?" Mitchell asked. His directness surprised Harrison. Before there was time for a thoughtful reply, Dorothy cut him off.
"Oh, Mitchell!" she scolded. She rolled her eyes and shook her head at the gaffe, which stunned Harrison out of whatever he was going to say next. So, it was a stroke of excellent fortune when Dorothy said it for him.
"He's been our dad this whole time."
END OF BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO:
ANTISYZYGY
Chapter Seventeen
Worries
"Wow. It just keeps coming down, doesn't it?"
Harrison was staring out the window of his hotel room. Normally, being on the fifteenth floor afforded an excellent view of the incipient nation to which he now belonged. The community was making excellent progress at retaming the wilderness. In addition to the log cabins and similar crude structures, real buildings, made of steel and glass, were undergoing such rapid construction that they seemed to be shooting up out of the ground. This particular January day, however, the best he could make out were rough outlines. New Chicago was experiencing its first bona fide winter storm.
"Weren't you explaining to me earlier that only boring people talk about the weather?" Glimmer was sitting on a plastic sofa on top of the dresser, leaning back against a throw pillow, handmade to scale. Dorothy had created a fully furnished guest room for the pixie from salvaged Barbie furniture and other assorted items. The children adored her, and she had assumed the role, if not of a mother, surely of an eccentric aunt in their unusual family.
Harrison turned an indignant gaze on her. She was wearing a purple prom gown. Her bare feet were propped up on the little, clear plastic coffee table, and her mittened hands were fidgeting with her toes. She had continued not to discuss the bandage. When the cold weather permitted her to hide her hands in a pair of mittens, she began not discussing why she kept the mittens on indoors.
"No," he said. "I told you that talking about the weather was boring in itself, which doesn't change the fact that absolutely everyone does it. And anyway, I wasn't so much talking about the weather as the snow."
She looked up from her toes. "The difference being?"
He flopped down in a chair in what they had come to think of as their dining room. Really, it was four rolling chairs around a small round table, suitable more for writing a post card or playing bridge. He sighed. "Being that I don't give a crap what's happening in the sky. It's what's on the ground that bugs me. I was supposed to go out on another salvage run tomorrow. Now we're going to need all the buggies to plow the roads."
What Harrison called buggies were in fact oversized, armored all-terrain vehicles, probably military. They looked like giant, six-wheeled vans. In the first days of the effort to rebuild Chicago, a large, boxy building had been discovered. It was locked down, however, and no one in the city had the ability or the tools to open it. Harrison's very first assignment as an agent of the government of New Chicago had been to get in. Seven of these vehicles had been found inside, and their acquisition had been a boon to exploration and salvage operations.
"Ever since they upped my security clearance," he added, "I've been itching to get back into the field."
She cocked an eyebrow. "Don't tell me you're actually starting to enjoy your work?"
He shrugged, unconvincingly. The truth was, he did enjoy what he was doing. At first, his job had primarily entailed using his ability under the scrutiny of a team of doctors and scientists who collected tons of data they wouldn't share with him. Beyond that, they had him attend pointless meetings with the other three cases. Waiting for something useful to do, he had become frustrated, his feelings aggravated by the fact that Claudia treated him like a bug. Nothing he had said or done since their initial encounter had smoothed over whatever problem existed between them. He was not, he concluded sadly, going to be her friend.
In the weeks that followed, he was eventually given tasks. On several occasions, he was allowed to accompany the salvage teams on their missions. Typically, a team of four would take a buggy out and either go to a known store or take a compass and go looking for one. His first day with them, their objective was an office building. All the storerooms there were locked. The last run to this building had been to salvage furniture and computers, and raiding the storerooms had been low priority. This time, Harrison would be opening the doors. It seemed like a lot of fuss and bother to take him all the way out there when they could probably just break down the doors with an axe or something, but he was coming to understand that bringing him along was more about giving him some field experience than about saving the lives of those doors.
"It's not that I enjoy it," he said, the lie sounding obvious even to him. "It's that I figured I might actually get to do something a little more important."
"You will," she said.
He shook his head. It had been two months since he and his kids had arrived in Chicago. Two months since he had gone straight from being a prisoner to being some sort of secret agent. The transition had not been comfortable. His idea of what it would be like to become part of this community was not panning out quite as he had envisioned it. His special circumstance kept him at a distance from almost everyone in town. He got along pretty well with Dallas and Sarah, the woman Dallas had called Eagle. He was grateful for that, anyway. Dallas was a bit of an odd bird, but Harrison had quite a bit in common with Sarah, and they had become pretty good friends in the last few weeks, to the point where she and her boyfriend had invited Harrison's family over for dinner twice. Still, at times, he was afraid that, while he had traded in his uncertainty for safety, he had thrown in his freedom as well. Then he thought of something he hadn't considered for a long time, and he shuddered.
"Are we safe here?" he suddenly asked.
Glimmer looked at him. "You mean in the hotel? You'd know better than I would about that. These things don't blow over, do they?"
"I'm not talking about the storm," he said. "And I'm not talking about the building. I mean this place, this New Chicago. Are we safe from the nasty little spy things? And the big, exploding tunnel doors and stuff?"
She yawned and curled up in a ball on the little sofa. "Probably," she said.
This was less than fully reas
suring. "When you say, 'probably,' do you mean, as in, the people who want me dead or whatever, they'll never find me here?" He had been kicking this idea around in his head since they had arrived, but before now he hadn't found the moment, or the courage, to give it voice. They weren't moving anymore, so by now they might have been found out, but Glimmer had always been irresponsibly vague about what would happen if they were ever caught.
"Oh," she said. "No, I imagine they've known you were here since mid-November."
"Mid-November!" He sprang out of the chair and uselessly drew the curtain. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"Think about it," she said calmly. "Somebody set a trap for you in Milwaukee. They knew we were in that tunnel. They must have seen that the shield didn't work. You and the kids traveled here from there on foot the whole way. They were probably tracking you." She yawned again. "I assumed you would have figured that out."
Harrison was starting to feel nauseated. "Why didn't they kill me on the road?"
"Probably didn't feel like it." She stretched out and rolled over.
Harrison remembered why he had put off discussing this concern. Every time he tried to talk to her about it, he got more of her evasive pixie bullshit. He was now extremely agitated. He felt that they had come so far as a team, but she was constantly dropping them back on square one. It was her nature to avoid answering questions, he knew, but it hurt that she seemed able to pick and choose when she could overcome her nature around him.
"Glimmer," he said, "I need to know. What happened to you after Milwaukee?" He had refrained from pushing this question ever since she had turned up alive. At first, he had figured she would tell him when she was ready, but he had come to realize that she didn't think like that. Waiting for her to be ready to talk about it would be treating her like a human, with human emotions and reactions. But she wasn't human, no matter how human she looked, no matter what he wanted her to be. "Glimmer?" She didn't answer. After a minute, he decided that she was asleep. Or pretending to be.
Chapter Eighteen
May 25 Stories
"I was shopping. One minute, I'm in the mall looking at a shirt, the next I'm standing outside, in a bed of gravel that must have been two miles wide." Sarah paused, trying to collect her thoughts. "It didn't all happen at once, either. I mean, it was fast, but not, I don't know, instant. At first, I got dizzy, and it looked like all the color had gone out of everything, and then the roof dissolved. People were popping like soap bubbles, left and right, not even leaving a mark. I remember thinking I should scream, but by the time I got my mouth open, everything was gone." She paused again and shrugged. "So I just started walking. My watch stopped, of course, so I have no idea how long I was on that gravel. Long enough to turn my feet into two huge blisters, I do know that. Eventually, I found a house. I stayed there until I heard Claudia the first time." She sniffed. "Then I started walking. It was quite a haul from Maryland. God, I haven't thought about that day in so long. What about you guys?"
She looked around invitingly. May 25 stories had become a cultural phenomenon as the New Chicago community grew. They were the one common frame of reference. For some, telling their stories repeatedly to everyone they met was cathartic. Others saved their stories and only offered them to their closest companions. In every case, the experience brought people together. Sharing a story was a personal initiation into each others' lives.
"I'll go," said Dorothy. She was sitting on one of the benches that had been built and earmarked for the first city park, scheduled to begin development in April. There were about thirty of them, all lined up on the lot in tidy rows, like pews. They were technically not for public use yet, but Harrison and Sarah had more latitude than most city-dwellers and frequently spent their off time there. This particular day was the first mild weather they had seen in months, and Harrison wanted the kids to get outside and get some fresh air. Sarah and her boyfriend, Warren, were already there, enjoying the thaw and the view. Harrison was glad to see them. Ever since he had been transferred to salvage, he had seen less of Sarah, and when he did see her, he relished the fact that it could be purely social. It had been difficult making friends, given his position, and Sarah and Warren were two of the very few people with whom he had grown close.
Dorothy told the story of her mother and two sisters. She paused occasionally, and it seemed to Harrison that she was struggling not to go on, as if by delaying the story she could keep her little sisters that much longer. He had heard this story before. He knew that the words and the timing were rehearsed. But the longing … that was always real. Sarah was biting her lip by the time Dorothy ended with the disappearance of her family. There was no discussion of what happened next, no tale of her journey to the Hallmark store or the home she had built for herself there, on her own. For her, the disappearance of her mother and sisters was the end of the story.
"Oh, honey," said Sarah. "Come here." She took the girl in her arms and rocked her. Warren looked unsure if he should say something and decided to let the woman handle it. Harrison had been there many, many times. This girl was a survivor, but he knew she would never, for the rest of her life, get enough hugs to smooth over that bump.
Sarah turned to Mitchell. "Do you have a story?" she asked.
Harrison stayed back, waiting to see how the boy would play this, ready to jump in if he needed saving. Mitchell usually got very quiet when people talked about May 25 around him.
He shrugged. "I was playing outside."
Sarah waited for more, cautious, nervous.
"He was alone," Harrison said. "He didn't really see anything happen. Right, Sport?" The full details of Mitchell's experience were still unknown to Harrison. Watching these kids play, he thought, it was sometimes easy to forget what they had all been through. There were hundreds of children in New Chicago, all of whom had stories to tell about how they had lost their parents. It was a miracle that they were able to function at all, and yet they had all come through and were adjusting any way they could. While Mitchell was an assertive and emotionally stable boy most of the time, he would sometimes slip out of character, and Harrison would see him as the poster child for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He wished he could be a real parent when those moments came. He did the best he could.
Apropos of nothing, Dorothy slapped Mitchell's arm, hard enough to be heard. It snapped him out of whatever catatonia he was sliding into, and he gave her a shocked look.
"You're it," she said deadpan, and bolted.
"Aaargh!" He leapt off the bench, fell down on the wet grass, and pulled himself up to run after her. Dorothy had a sizable head start, and she made it into a copse of trees well before he could catch her.
"She'll be dodging him in there for a good fifteen minutes before she lets him catch her," Harrison observed to the other adults. "He would've had a fighting chance on open ground, but she's a real squirrel when she gets into the trees."
"She's amazing," Sarah said.
Harrison shook his head. "They both are. Mitchell came here with me on foot the whole way from Milwaukee. Dorothy joined us not much farther south than that. Both of them had been living on their own for months when I found them. It's incredible to me that they can go back to being kids."
"They're lucky you found them," she said. Her expression looked confused, and he thought she was mocking him, but then he looked a little closer and realized that she was giving him a look. It was not one he recognized. It was respect.
He tried to shrug it off. "We were all lucky, I think." He thought of some other things he could say, to diminish the importance of what he had done for the children, but decided to let it go. He could take the occasional compliment, if not gracefully, at least gratefully.
"So," Sarah changed the subject, "where's Glimmer? I thought she was your sidekick."
Harrison laughed. "I'm hers, more like. She had a …" He twirled his hand in a gesture of vagueness. "A thing. Down at Esoteric. They needed her input on something I can't even pronounce."<
br />
"How's her hand?" Warren asked. He thought he was making small talk, but the question touched a nerve.
"Beats me," said Harrison. "I've given up asking her about it. She still wears a mitten, that much I can tell you."
Sarah was giving Warren a look now, and Harrison took it to mean that he should get a move on. He started to get up, about to make a polite excuse, when Warren nodded and Sarah said, "Harrison, we have something we want to tell you."
He froze. That wasn't what he thought she was going to say, but he had a pretty good idea where she was going with it. He sat down again. "Yes?" he said smiling. It was drawn way out, inviting.
She was blushing. "We're going to have a baby."
His face lit up. "Oh, my God! This is huge! When?"
She exhaled heavily. "September." She looked at him plaintively. "You're not upset?"
The question surprised him. "Why would I be upset?" For a moment, he thought she might have believed that he had feelings for her, that he would be jealous, but that made no sense. She had been a big sister to him. He had eagerly allowed her to slip into that role. She could never replace Lisa, his actual big sister, but she had been a welcome surrogate.
"It's just that you're the first person we've told. We just …" She tried to find the words.
Warren finished her sentence. "We're afraid of how people are going to react. We're bringing a new person into this world. Not everyone is going to think it's a good idea."
"Was this planned?" asked Harrison. The question seemed crass, but these were his friends. They wanted his opinion.
"Absolutely," Sarah said over Warren's nod and attempt to say yes.
"Then screw everyone else," said Harrison. "This is the best news I've ever heard."
Warren turned to Sarah and said, "Please don't screw everyone else." They laughed.