by Karen Healey
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Karen Healey
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First Edition: May 2014
[CIP to come]
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
RRD-C
Printed in the United States Of America
For Kieran Hartley York,
who gives me hope for the future.
And for Willow, who fights for it.
CHAPTER ONE
Sanguinante
They always wanted me to sing “Here Comes the Sun.”
It used to be one of my favorite Beatles songs. The lyrics capture so simply the longing for light. The singer talks about the lonely winter, the ice that hasn’t melted in a long time, but he repeats over and over that the sun is coming soon.
In 1969, over a hundred and fifty years ago, George Harrison was having a hard winter. He’d been arrested, he’d had his tonsils removed, and he was being forced to comply with the corporate demands of the Beatles’ record company. He’d even temporarily quit the band.
Then, one winter’s day, he walked around a friend’s backyard with an acoustic guitar and wrote “Here Comes the Sun.”
It’s supposed to be a love song, and I know the audiences heard it as one. But to me it’s not about romance. If anything, it’s a dedication to hope, to the fragile, delicate possibility of things getting better before the long winter swallows us all.
Once, I sang “Here Comes the Sun” for Tegan Oglietti. She died in 2027, a hundred years ago, and was cryonically preserved, only to be revived in our time. She was the first person who’d returned to life from the long winter of death. She chose that song to sing to our classmates, and when her voice cracked and faded, I sang it with her.
She says she loved me for that, so maybe I’m wrong about the lack of romance. But I know I’m right about the hope.
Six months after I first sang that song for Tegan, I sang it for a number of well-dressed people gathered in a hotel ballroom in Brisbane, Australia. The people I was singing to wanted me to give them hope. Earth was overcrowded, overpolluted, and fast running out of resources. The oceans were beginning to die, and humanity on Earth would go with them. But my audience wanted to buy a second chance, on another world. Cryonics offered them that chance—cryonics and the gigantic starship currently being constructed in orbit. If the revival process could be perfected, these fortunate ones could escape the dying world and sleep while the starship traveled to its distant destination. They could wake, centuries later, to a new sun.
I finished embellishing the final notes as the backing track died away and raised my hands to acknowledge the applause. In the last six months, I’d performed for all kinds of people, but this was my most common audience: wealthy Australians who wanted to secure their places on that ship. Body mods were popular in Australia, but here there were very few flashing lights set into teeth or heat-reactive tattoos flashing slogans. Instead, there was a lot of subtle surgery designed to disguise the signs of aging.
“Hello,” I said, pitching my voice over the applause. “Thank you all for coming!”
They applauded again, but their eyes widened as the wall behind me lit up. The main attraction, and she wasn’t even here in the flesh.
“I’m Abdi Taalib,” I said. “And this is Tegan Oglietti.”
Tegan’s face swam into view on the wall.
She looked beautiful and composed, and though it was night for us in Brisbane, sunlight cast crisp shadows on her fine-featured face. Tegan was actually in Japan, the final stop on her two-month world tour before she came home.
“Hi, Abdi,” she said, and blew me a kiss. I caught it, smiling, and pressed my palm to my heart. “And hello to you,” she went on, beaming at the gathered people. “Let me tell you a story.”
The audience settled down.
“Over a hundred years ago, I died,” she began, and I had to concentrate on looking interested. I knew the rest of the story by heart—I’d witnessed most of it and knew just how much of this retelling was actually true. But I had to look alert and nod as Tegan told the rapt crowd how she’d been shot dead in a tragic error, a sniper’s mistaken target, in 2027. She’d been revived by the Australian army in 2128, the first—and so far only—successful revival from cryonic suspension. When she’d foolishly run from her government protectors, she—and I—had been kidnapped by the Inheritors of the Earth, religious zealots who wanted to deny her the right to her second life. Those zealots had filled her head with lies. They’d used a government secret to confuse her: The Australian government had been at work on the starship, getting it ready to send sleeping settlers to a bright new land. The Inheritors told her that the refugees who crowded Australia’s borders had been imprisoned and frozen, slave labor for this new world.
The audience shifted uncomfortably, but Tegan continued, describing how the Inheritors considered giving people new life to be blasphemy. They’d planned to destroy the ship and destroy second chances forever. And the signal for that destruction was to be—
“—the suicide of Tegan Oglietti,” Tegan said.
The crowd knew this story. The whole world knew this story. But they still gasped, right on cue.
Tegan went on to tell how we had escaped from the Inheritors. She’d thought that the army and government were exploiting those refugees and that exposing their plans could save thousands. So she’d told her story, in a livecast viewed by millions all over the world. Everyone had known about the refugees then. Everyone had known about the starship. And the Australian government had been besieged by angry voters wanting to know the truth.
“But here’s what I didn’t know,” Tegan said. “The refugees were volunteers, not prisoners. Those poor people were driven to Australia by war and hunger and thirst. It’s a sad fact that we can’t care for them here; Australia simply doesn’t have the resources.”
Keeping my face from showing what I really thought about that particular line had taken a lot of practice. But I’d been drilled, and now I drew my mouth down at the corners and nodded solemnly.
“The refugees weren’t coerced,” Tegan went on. “They
agreed to cryosuspension, and they agreed to keep it secret, for fear of sabotage. A fear that was well founded, thanks to those extremists from the Inheritors of the Earth. Fortunately, the starship was protected. And over the last six months, piece by piece, it’s been taken into space and reconstructed.”
“On a new planet, these refugees can care for themselves,” I broke in. “As a citizen of a poor African nation, I can tell you that people from less wealthy countries want to contribute to the project however they can—in this case, with their labor. They want to build their new home.”
Tegan nodded. “A new home to become everyone’s home,” she said. “Isn’t that amazing?”
The crowd agreed that it was.
Someone stepped into the background of the ’cast and bent over Tegan’s shoulder. It was her handler, Lat.
The skin along my spine tightened. I propped my smile up again and hoped the tension didn’t show.
“I have to go,” Tegan told us all. “But I’ll be back in Australia soon! Abdi and I are hosting the President’s Ball in a few days. Won’t that be fun?”
“I’m looking forward to it with all my heart,” I told her, and returned the blown kiss. She laughed, her voice light as a feather, her dark eyes sparkling with barely tempered joy, and caught the kiss in her hand.
As the ’cast faded out, she pressed her palm to her lips.
The moment I stepped off the stage, my handler appeared.
“Abdi, that was great!” Her eyes were shining with suppressed amusement.
I ignored it as best I could. “Thank you, Diane.”
“You simply must come and meet some people,” she said, and I was introduced to my first target for the evening, an elderly woman whose name I promptly forgot.
“That was a wonderful story,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“My grandnephew tried to tell me that the thirdie refugees were being forced onto the ship, but I said don’t be silly, Callum. I wish he’d come tonight.” She leaned in close to confide, “I think he’s a bit crushie for you.”
Diane laughed. “Oh, everyone falls for Abdi. The serious boys always get the interest, don’t they?”
“You’re a very good-looking young man. And your voice! No wonder Callum’s all abuzz. But these Save Tegan people he’s fixy with don’t seem very nice.”
My interest spiked. “He’s socializing with people who… do they claim to speak for Tegan, ma’am?”
“Oh, it’s that group they’ve been fussing about on the ’casts.” She waved a beringed hand. “Troublemakers, you know.”
I hadn’t had access to unfiltered news for six months. I didn’t know, and with Diane watching me, I didn’t dare ask.
“They think Tegan’s in some kind of trouble with the government,” the nameless woman said. “Ridiculous. Look at you both, so healthy and beautiful. It’s lovely that you could spare the time to meet us here. When do you go home?” She meant Melbourne—not my real home, a terra-cotta house in Djibouti City.
“The day after tomorrow,” Diane said, her smile glittering like knives. “Abdi has loved visiting Queensland, though.”
“It’s very beautiful,” my mouth said. “It reminds me a little of Djibouti, with the beaches.”
“I thought Djibouti was a desert,” the nameless woman said. Her tone was sharper. The people at these parties didn’t like being wrong or uncertain. And it was harder to get money out of them when they were.
“A coastal desert,” I told her. “The Red Sea and Gulf of Aden are full of life. There are thousands of species in the water.” The space under my ribs was expanding with homesickness. I wanted very badly to go down to the Red Sea again, to strap on a snorkel and float, peaceful in warm salt water. My younger sister, Sahra, would be there, but she wouldn’t bug me, too entranced by the movements of fish. She wanted to be a marine biologist, which would mean a lot of study abroad. My mother was reluctant to let her last baby go, but my money was on Sahra. She was stubborn, my little sister. Like Tegan.
The nameless woman was looking at me. If her face had been able to wrinkle with concern, I think it would have.
“Are you all right?” she asked softly.
I rose out of that empty space and met her eyes with baffled good cheer. “Of course.”
Diane touched her EarRing with her second finger; a signal to me, not a response to any call someone had made. “I’m afraid we have to move on,” she said, and I summoned an apologetic smile before we turned away.
“Less talk about Djibouti, more about the refugee camps,” Diane said, as we moved out of earshot. “Lots of positive statements. Hit the talking points. How the camps are fine as a short-term solution, but refugees are embracing the long-term opportunities the Ark Project has provided.”
I stumbled. Diane adjusted beautifully, her grace turning the misstep into a pause, a carefully choreographed beat in a dance. But her eyes stared into mine, measuring.
“I don’t know if I can do that convincingly,” I said. There was a trace of fear clouding my voice, like a drop of ink in a still pool.
Diane leaned in, close enough that I could feel her breath on my cheek. “Of course you can, Abdi. You’re very good at being convincing. Why do you think we sent you to the camps? Why do you think you’re here?”
Because I’m African, I thought. Because I’m a thirdie. You want me to tell these people that the refugees want this, that what the Australian government is doing to people who come here out of fear and desperation is just and noble. And you want me to persuade the refugees they should file into their cryopods as docilely as sheep into a pen.
I thought it very deep down and let none of the thought show on my face.
Diane straightened the line of my somber green shirt, long fingers dancing down the lapels. I stayed still, a small creature playing dead in the presence of a predator. “You can tell them everything we need you to if you try. You’re here because these are serious people. You’re good at being serious, Abdi.”
The people here didn’t look serious. One of the men a few feet from me was loudly discussing, in great detail, a horse he’d just bought and who he intended to beat with it. If Australia allowed migration, the money he’d spent on that horse could have been loaned to the people in the camps, setting up a family in a business they could maintain. If he’d been willing to make the money a gift, not a loan, it could have contributed to another medical center or paid for training someone to contribute to Australia’s need for skilled technicians.
But he’d stood there and nodded as Tegan told them that Australia didn’t have resources.
“I can be serious,” I said, holding her gaze. I wasn’t allowed to break eye contact.
“Serious and convincing,” Diane said, and the back of my neck exploded.
The pain coursed down my spine, every nerve in my body flaring red-hot. My skin felt as if I were rolling in broken glass. My scalp tightened over my skull like an iron band, and my mouth flooded with the taste of copper. I made a high, sharp sound, then forced my teeth to clench.
Making noise in public had to be punished.
From the outside, I must have looked a little unwell, perhaps momentarily dizzy. Faces turned toward me, then politely away.
Diane laid her free hand on my wrist, her face composed in concern. Her other hand was hidden in the folds of her outfit, clutching the implant controller, and that was the one I watched.
It felt like eternity. It always did. Realistically, though, it was only a few seconds that I suffered, while Diane touched me and smiled, her hidden hand drawing pain from me until I thought my bones would burst through my skin. When she finally turned off the controller, I almost collapsed with relief, locking my knees at the last second.
“There we go,” Diane murmured, and stroked my sweating palm as if she were soothing a fretting pet. “Do you think you can talk about the camps for me now?”
“Yes, Diane,” I said, and hated myself.
“And if t
hey mention Save Tegan, you brush it off. They’re malcontents who have no idea what they’re talking about, understand?”
“Yes, Diane.”
“Good boy,” she said, and pointed me at the next target, her fingers stroking at my shuddering pulse. “Fetch.”
CHAPTER TWO
Tremolo
I got through the rest of the night without further incidents. The morning was spent in rehearsal, the afternoon in what Diane called “nap time.”
I didn’t sleep. I stared at the ceiling and counted the tiles in my hotel room—six vertical, four horizontal—and wondered, clinically, when the horror might end.
It was hard to believe everything had begun with something as simple as a song at my cousin’s wedding. The bride’s family was from Somalia, and I’d been showing off a little—there were some nice-looking girls I hadn’t seen before. My brother could impress them with his shoulders, but I had to rely on my voice, and I was making it do a lot of work for me that day.
I didn’t get anywhere with the girls, but the firster who caught it on camera was certainly impressed. Her ’cast (imaginatively titled “Local Boy Sings!!!”) hit the tubes at just the right moment; whatever alchemical formula makes instant celebrity kicked in, and I was suddenly famous.
It was funny, how quickly it blew up. At home, my flute lessons and singing were only hobbies. My family was proud of me, in their way, but they made it clear that it was my studies that I was supposed to concentrate on, my brain that was going to earn my place in history. Music was a part of me but only a small part. But to firsters, my voice was all they knew of me. My singing was everything.
Barely an hour after the ’cast hit the tubes, the first offers came. I ignored the interview requests and politely refused the recording contracts. No, I wouldn’t record an album. No, I wouldn’t open for their band on tour. It was very flattering, but I needed to concentrate on my schoolwork.
Then the scholarship offers came. Ifrah and Halim, my older siblings, stopped teasing me for having a big head, and my little sister, Sahra, stopped whining that she could sing, too, and no one had ’cast her. My parents stopped being serenely amused about the whole situation. School offers—that was serious business.