by Lou Aronica
“Your parents’ deaths were accidental, Miea. It wasn’t due to sabotage or an aggressive act by the Thorns or anything like that.”
Miea sat up. “The investigators have said the same thing repeatedly, but bridges don’t simply collapse like that. Since they could never explain how this one did, I always sent them back to find out who was responsible.”
“I know you did. I followed the official investigation very closely. It was accidental, though, Miea. The bridge collapsed because it could no longer bear the stress of the entire entourage. Here’s what I know that the official investigators never found—and it seems sadly ironic to tell you this today—the cause of the accident dates back to the Great Blight. The stanchions of the bridge were held together with a compound that included kootenai, a living plant organism in stasis. Kootenai has tremendous adhesive qualities and it was involved in the building of many older structures. As it was destroying many other plants in the area, the Blight killed the kootenai binding the stanchions. The official investigators never thought to look into this because the Blight had happened so long before.”
“Then why didn’t the bridge collapse the first time someone crossed it after the Great Blight?”
“The rest of the compound was strong enough to withstand most loads. Your parents’ traveling party was too big, though. As the histories have noted, Amelan insisted that an enormous security crew accompany them. Still, they might have crossed safely if not for one other event. The lead security vehicle broke down and the entire motorcade stopped on the bridge as repairs to the vehicle were completed. The pressure proved too much for the bridge and the stanchions gave. I can show you how I recreated those events if you’d like.”
Miea envisioned those final moments as her parents and the many good people who’d traveled with them realized the bridge was doomed and they had no escape. They must have been so frightened. So desperate.
As the vision played itself out in her mind, she wept for her parents again as though she’d never wept for them before. The entire time, Dyson held her, allowing her to reexperience her loss. I wish you’d been there to hold me that day, Dyson. I should have run into your arms. I should have demanded they take you with me to the Palace. I was lost, though, and I lost you.
At last, she looked up at him and touched his face. “Thank you. It’s hard to believe any person would do this for me.”
Dyson kissed her hand. “I only hope it helps a little.”
“It’s going to take some time for me to reconcile this, but yes, it helps. It’s different knowing that no one did this deliberately. Even though it saddens me to think about how easily this could have been avoided, there’s some solace in knowing no one set out to do them harm.”
“It’s one less burden for you to carry, Miea.”
Miea looked deeply into Dyson’s eyes and realized that what he said was true. The realization that there was someone in the world willing to help her this way and who understood her enough to do it filled her. She reached for the man she thought she’d let go years ago.
Although she still had burdens enough to bring herself and the entire kingdom down, they kissed, and Miea felt alive in a way she thought she never would again.
The difference in Becky’s appearance between Tuesday night and Thursday was terrifying to Chris. On Tuesday, her spirits had been good and her complexion pink. Tonight, she was listless, her eyes cloudy, her skin tone pallid. She wasn’t shutting down yet, was she? They had more time than this, didn’t they?
Becky had a few bites to eat and then lay on the couch while he cleaned up after dinner. He’d bought her favorite ice cream for dessert, Stonyfield Farm Chocolate Raspberry Swirl, but it stayed in the freezer. Maybe she’d be better on Saturday and they’d have it then. When he finished in the kitchen, he sat next to her and stroked her hair.
“I’m wiped, Dad.”
“I know, babe. Is there anything I can do?”
“I don’t think so.” She sighed. “I tried to do too much in school today. I was feeling okay, so Lonnie and I took a walk out back at lunchtime. That was stupid.”
It wasn’t stupid. Chris knew it was Becky’s way of fighting. Even a minor victory would have been nice. “You can rest now. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“Yeah, maybe,” she said vacantly. “Maybe this is just a reaction to the new drug.” She drifted off for a few minutes after that, her eyes fixed on the far wall. “We’re going to Mendana Island tonight to do some research, right?”
The blight had ravaged the tiny island and Chris thought he might be able to learn a great deal there, assuming the Tamariskian machines worked with some level of consistency. Becky didn’t seem in any condition to travel, though. At this point, he was assuming he’d be carrying her to her bed because she would be too exhausted to walk.
“Beck, we might want to pass on Tamarisk tonight.”
Becky stirred enough to turn to face him. “We can’t do that.”
“We may have to. We don’t know what these journeys are doing to your body. They might be too stressful.”
“Are you saying we shouldn’t go anymore?”
This was obviously upsetting her. “I’m saying that we might need to wait until Saturday to go again. You have good days and bad days, Beck. This is a bad one.”
Becky sat up, making an all-too-obvious attempt to convince him she was in better shape than he thought. “I can do it. If the journeys beat me up, I would feel it when we got there, right? I never do.”
This was yet another of the many conundrums facing Chris now. Clearly going to Tamarisk was tremendously important to Becky. Yet just as clearly, she wasn’t in a condition to do it. Was going there hastening her decline? If so, though, which had greater value: a limited number of days filled with wonder or a slightly less limited number of days filled with waiting for the end?
“Do you really think you’re up for this the way you’re feeling?”
“I really am.”
Chris nodded. “Then we’ll go to Mendana. Let’s make it an early night, though. Okay?”
They were sitting on Becky’s bed an hour later. Chris had a difficult time darkening because he couldn’t stop thinking about what this trip could wind up doing to Becky. What if the effort sapped so much energy from her that she passed into a coma? As much as his battles with Polly wore on him, he didn’t want to be responsible for stealing a last conversation between her and her daughter. Because he knew that Becky wanted to go to Tamarisk, he forced himself to push such worries aside, along with everything else. Becky needed to take these trips for as long as she was physically capable.
They emerged outside of the palace, where a vehicle was waiting for them. When he opened his eyes, Chris looked to his left to see if Becky was okay. He found her gazing broadly and taking an exaggeratedly deep breath.
Becky smiled when she caught his eye. “I love the smell of this place.”
Rather than debilitating her, the journey seemed to have revived Becky. She has such an incredibly strong will, Chris thought. She’s summoning all of her strength to show me she can still do this. If fate was even a little bit kinder, I know she could fight this disease out of her body. Chris knew better, though. Questionable radical experiments aside, there was nothing—not even the power of optimism—that could eradicate his daughter’s illness. For this moment, however, Chris would try to convince himself that Becky had found a second wind, one that would last her at least to the end of this trip.
The vehicle took them several miles to the port, where they boarded a sailboat to take them to Mendana Island. Dyson, one of the minister of agriculture’s aides, joined them at the port for the half hour trip.
“Have there been any new developments in the past two days?” Chris said when the boat took sail.
“Nothing good, I’m afraid. The queen has declared a state of emergency in two more regions of the kingdom. We’re evacuating everything we can from Jonrae at this point. The seapowet is literally starving
to death. We’ve brought several dozen of them to our facilities to try to keep them alive, but I don’t know how successful we’ll be. The seapowet feeds on the nectar of ochoco—which grows only in Jonrae—and the ochoco fields are so devastated that the few surviving plants will wither in transport.”
“We’ve gotta do something, Dad,” Becky said.
“I know we do, babe. I wish we had more time and more information.” Chris turned to Dyson. “Have you been able to figure out why we’re getting discrepancies in the calibrations?”
“I’m afraid that has turned out to be nearly as confusing as everything else associated with this blight. We took several readings yesterday at various times and all the calibrations were consistent.”
“Maybe the machines have adjusted to the environmental changes.”
“We can only hope so. We’ll see what we learn today. A crew has been working at our Mendana outpost for several hours already.”
Chris saw the island come into view. From the middle distance, it seemed sparsely vegetated, but as they got closer, Chris realized that what he’d mistaken for dirt (what he first perceived as black he now saw as dark ash) was actually huge patches of plants in the last stages of necrosis. This was the worst case he’d seen yet, and it was much closer to the palace than the other fields he’d visited, even if this one was surrounded by water. Was the disease that was extinguishing this island currently riding the waves back to the city that was Tamarisk’s beating heart?
They debarked and rode another vehicle toward the center of the island. The trees were barren here, pale multihued branches laid naked. Slim flowers occasionally peeked up from blue leaves, but the vegetation that remained alive was mostly unadorned.
“The tongass is gone,” Dyson said mournfully. “There are other places in the kingdom where the tongass has withstood the blight. I thought we could learn something from that. It has been devastated here, though.”
Chris understood the sense of loss in Dyson’s voice all too well. When the vehicle stopped near the crew that arrived that morning, Chris exited slowly, heavy-hearted.
“It’s so upsetting, isn’t it?” Becky said. “Do you remember this place from the stories?”
“The name seems familiar, but I couldn’t think of why I knew it.”
“The Rainbow Fair.”
“This is that place?” Chris glanced around him with a new sense of distress. The story they’d created about this island came vividly to mind now. It was about the event that turned this lightly populated spot into the hottest destination in Tamarisk one weekend a year—a festival that set itself against the natural splendor of hundreds of varieties of flowers in full bloom displaying the full spectrum of the Tamariskian rainbow. There would be no Rainbow Fair this year. “We need to get to work.”
He examined cuttings with the botanists’ machinery, reading reports and trying to put them into context. As before, Becky helped him in whatever way she could. Even though there were many other people available to do the same thing, she seemed revived by the work, and Chris wanted her to be as involved as possible. The Becky he saw now was far different from the sallow girl he’d sat with less than an hour ago. She pitched in diligently, and when he asked her if she needed to take a break, she scoffed at the absurdity of the question.
There seemed to be new problems with the calibrations, though. Dyson quizzed the staff on their earlier findings and each swore that the readings had been consistent all day. There had been heavy cloud cover until shortly before his arrival, and it was possible that clear sunshine had made an appreciable difference on the plants, even those as diseased as these.
Chris pondered this. It had been very sunny on Chris’s first day out in the fields, but overcast the second when the readings showed fewer discrepancies. Was there a way for them to simulate the effects of the sun and maybe combat the blight with this artificial nourishment? It was something else to consider.
While he studied a screen, he heard Becky squeal. Instantly alarmed, he pivoted to the sound only to realize that her exclamation was one of joy. She’d knelt down to pet a rotund, furry, biped animal no more than two feet high.
“It’s a chestatee,” Becky said. “Remember them, Dad? He seems a little confused.”
Chris guessed the chestatee was likely very confused. He remembered the docile animals well from their stories. They lived in trees and fed off the vegetation on the branches. This little guy was probably wondering why he was hungry all the time now.
Becky sat on the ground to pet the chestatee and it climbed into her lap, making a deep rumbling sound. For the first time, Chris noted the particular music of this island, bass-heavy and monotone. Because it was closest, he heard this particular chestatee distinctly, but he was certain others of its kind were contributing to the island’s aural backdrop.
The animal climbed Becky’s chest and licked at her chin. Becky laughed in surprise and tipped over backward. She snuggled the chestatee close to her and then playfully pawed at it, causing the chestatee to wave a paw at her as well. The two lay together playing for several minutes as Chris reveled in the pleasure on his daughter’s face. Her laugh was melodious, her eyes radiant. It was such a contrast to how she appeared in the apartment that he nearly wept over the fact that Tama-risk—even in the midst of its own crisis—could give her moments like this.
Eventually, Becky stood up and brushed herself off. The chestatee sauntered away, probably in search of food. Chris barely noticed them, though. His eyes instead went to the spot the two of them had vacated.
The withered plants upon which Becky and the animal had lain were now a brilliant blue.
20
Chris was still puzzling over the strange occurrence in Mendana two days later when Becky and he returned to Tamarisk. They took cuttings from the refreshed plants immediately and found the samples to be hearty and strong. Readings elsewhere fluctuated throughout the day. Chris and some of the Tamariskian scientists tried to find another chestatee, wondering if the animal, or perhaps the animal’s interaction with Becky had some bearing on the blight, but none were around. It was yet another mystery that left him feeling both closer to and farther from a solution.
Today, Becky and he were planning to go to another blighted region of Tamarisk where chestatees lived. There was no scientific reason to believe the animals had a healing effect on the ecosystem, but it was foolish to ignore even wild speculation at this point.
Becky seemed a little better tonight. Chris marveled at how she’d rallied herself the last time they were in Tamarisk; the image of her wrestling playfully with the chestatee was nearly as incongruous as the mark they’d left on the ground. When they had gotten home that night, she fell asleep in mid-sentence and had trouble getting up to go to school the next morning. Tonight, though, she ate a little more for dinner and even felt strong enough for a board game before they made their trip. Chris knew there would be far more nights like Thursday in Becky’s future than there would be nights like tonight, but he was thankful for any grace.
As with the last time they visited Tamarisk, they arrived outside of the castle, expecting a vehicle to be waiting for them. So many things still confused him about these transits (beyond the obvious, of course). How, for instance, did they know when and where Becky and he would show up? Did they simply have greeters posted everywhere?
No vehicle was here this time, though. Instead, they found one of Miea’s aides who informed Chris that the queen wished to see him alone. Chris thought it was odd that Miea would exclude Becky from any conversation, but Becky reminded him that the test results were due from the Tamariskian doctor.
“She must have bad news, Dad,” Becky said, resigned. Becky hadn’t mentioned the test results all day, but obviously she’d pinned more hopes on them than Chris had anticipated.
“We don’t know that, babe. This could have nothing to do with that. Maybe she wants to talk to me privately about what happened in Mendana and then she’ll call you in to talk abo
ut the results.” This made no sense to Chris, and he doubted he’d convinced Becky with such shallow reasoning, but it was the best he could offer in an attempt to reassure her.
Sorbus pulled Miea out of a meeting the moment Chris arrived. The queen asked him to follow her to her chambers and requested argo from her aide for both of them. Chris sat on a sofa and Miea sat across from him in a high-backed chair. It was obvious Miea had something important to tell him, but she waited until they sat to get to it.
“Dr. Nella delivered her report on Becky a few hours ago.”
Chris instantly felt nervous. He’d convinced himself not to place any hopes on this. He’d even tried to put it out of his mind entirely. Now he realized he’d failed to do either. “Can she help?”
“She found nothing.”
Chris’s heart sank. “So there’s nothing you can do, either.” Yet another potential miracle cure had turned out to be pure fancy.
“No, Chris, you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not saying that she couldn’t find anything that would help Becky. I’m saying that she couldn’t find anything at all. Becky doesn’t have cancer here. Becky doesn’t have any illness here.”
Chris leaned closer to Miea, as though he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. “She’s not sick?”
Miea smiled. “I have no way to say what she’s like in Connecticut, but she’s not sick when she’s here.”
Chris wasn’t sure how to react. “Maybe it’s the machines. We’ve been getting all kinds of inconsistent readings out in the fields.”
“It isn’t the machines. Dr. Nella knew what to look for. We have a great deal of experience here with this kind of disease.”
Of course they would. In the early stories Becky created about Tamarisk, the subject had come up on numerous occasions. “But how can she possibly not be sick here?”
Miea sat up in her chair. Her eyes were brighter than Chris had ever seen them. “I don’t think anyone can answer that question. I have a guess, though. Becky told me that Tamarisk was your idea.”