Immutable

by Cidney Swanson

  “Then I’ll wait,” Martina replied calmly. “And seeing as I don’t have a vehicle, I’ll wait here. Inside, since I forgot sunscreen, if you don’t mind.” She could already feel the fair skin on the backs of her calves turning pink in the intense Caribbean sun.

  She pushed hard on his chest to shove him aside. His skin against her palms felt alive with electricity. She vowed to avoid touching him for the remainder of her visit. Which shouldn’t be hard, considering the sight of him made her angrier than she could remember being since … well, since he’d left without a word two years earlier.

  Matteo shifted out of her way, caught off guard when she shoved past him. But then he recovered and grabbed her by the wrist. “You want to see her? You want to see her?” He was shaking as he spoke. “Fine! Come with me.”

  Still grasping Martina by the wrist, he marched her around one side of the small dwelling. She had to pass between the two almost-dead trees. Closer inspection showed they weren’t almost dead. They were truly dead. Brown and black sticks with dark, dry, dead leaves still clinging to twiggy, dead branches. A gust of wind caused the leaves to shiver against one another, a lonely sound.

  And then Martina saw the exposed earth, humped into a low mound. Person-sized. Grave-sized. Mutti-sized.

  14

  JUST A HOLLOW

  Sint Maarten, The Caribbean

  “No,” she whispered.

  The leaves behind her whispered back, rattling in a quiet susurration.

  “No!” she said again. “No!” She was shouting now and running to the gently mounded pile of earth, dried by the hot wind except toward the bottom on one side so that Martina could tell the soil had been turned recently.

  “There has to be a mistake,” she heard herself saying as she circled the grave. “Something’s wrong. Pfeffer gave me her address. He would have known if something happened to her. It’s a mistake. You’re wrong, I’m telling you Matteo, you’re wrong.”

  She spoke the words rapidly, with conviction, but she knew the truth already. She would never see Mutti again. This was what Matteo meant, saying she’d come too late.

  She would never feel Mutti’s arms around her again.

  Martina fell to the ground, fists pounding angrily as she repeated it had to be a mistake, contradicted the truth, tried to make the past conform to what she wanted instead of what was.

  It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t meant to happen this way. She needed Mutti—needed her as she had never needed anyone before. Tears spilled down her face.

  It wasn’t fair. After all the time she’d spent alone, so alone, Mutti couldn’t be gone, too. She couldn’t be. “I … need … you,” she sobbed, choking on the words, each sticking barb-like in her throat. “I need you,” she groaned to the silent earth.

  At last she fell forward, her left cheek pressed to the hot, dry dirt on top of the grave, her arms sprawled to either side, and she howled in bitter agony, not caring who heard her.

  By the time her first anguish was spent, the sun had sunk below the horizon line. At some point, Matteo had set up a half-busted umbrella to protect Martina from the worst of the Caribbean sun. Her skin felt crinkly on one wrist; it must have lain outside the pale of the umbrella’s jurisdiction.

  “How did it happen?” she asked at last. Her voice was nearly gone, spent in crying.

  Matteo must have been expecting the question. He answered right away. “Liver failed. ‘S’what the doctor said was happening. Last week, he told me she didn’t have long—” Matteo’s voice cracked and he was silent for a full minute. At last, he sniffled, ran the back of his hand over his nose, and spoke again. “She drank till she passed out most nights. I mean, she always drank, but she drank hard ever since … ever since … when she heard what happened last February.”

  Martina nodded. She remembered Mutti’s vodka bottles covered in Cyrillic lettering; her home brews when the bottles couldn’t be purchased. She can hold her liquor, the other mothers said of Mutti. Martina didn’t think she’d ever seen Mutti cross the line from merry to inebriated.

  But she knew well enough what had happened last February. The launch of the Angel Corps’ deadly campaign. The thousands of deaths, stopped only because Dr. Pfeffer and de Rochefort had killed Helmann.

  “Dr. Pfeffer contacted the foster mothers whose whereabouts he knew,” said Matteo. “He wanted them to know they weren’t responsible for what the Angels did. At first, he located only four of the scattered mothers. They helped him find others. Like Mutti.”

  “Pfeffer should have kept his mouth shut.”

  Matteo shrugged. “She would have figured it out. He was trying to stop her from feeling responsible. Only, he couldn’t.”

  Martina understood. Mutti would have taken it personally. Of course she would have. Unlike some of the other foster mothers, Mutti had never shirked responsibility for anything. And she’d loved the children she’d raised. Not all the foster mothers had. February had been bad for Martina. It must have been devastating for Mutti.

  “Come inside,” Matteo said. “Mutti left some things. For each of you. She was sober most mornings and she would talk about the five of you. Sometimes the six of you. She got confused about Katrin towards the end. She set something aside for her, too.”

  Katrin, thought Martina. The ache for her twin sister throbbed, freshly painful.

  Martina didn’t move. She watched a pair of clouds chasing one another over the lowlands beside a long, narrow strip of sand.

  “Come on,” Matteo said again. He held a hand out.

  Martina took it. No electricity this time. Nothing. Just an ache. Just a hollow. Just a space that would never be filled. The woman she’d called mother was gone. Gone when Martina had needed her most.

  Back inside the tiny house, the sickening sweet stench was worse.

  “It smells bad,” said Martina. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth. Her eyes stung like the time she’d sunburned them staring at snow in Alaska or Russia or wherever that had been. Her skin, where she’d lain on the grave, was caked with dirt and sweat. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

  Matteo sighed. “Sit.” When Martina complied, he crossed to the “kitchen” part of the room and began gathering rotten fruit and empty bottles from the counter. He opened the four windows of the dwelling, one on each wall and then filled the garbage pail once, twice. The sickening odor died back, carried away by the hot, sticky wind that blew and blew and blew across the empty hillside.

  Once he had finished cleaning, Matteo walked into the back bedroom. When he returned, he was carrying a small wooden box. A cigar box, thought Martina. There had been lots of those on one of the islands the children had lived on. Sinking onto a rickety stool opposite her, Matteo pulled something small and white from the box.

  “This was for Katrin. You should take it.”

  Martina looked at the object: a bleached starfish hardly larger than a one-euro coin tied to a bit of string long enough to encircle a child’s neck. The children had not been permitted to own or wear jewelry. Katrin had made the necklace in defiance of the ban.

  “I remember when Mutti took this from Katrin,” said Martina, rasping the words.

  “Mutti threw it away, like she was supposed to. I grabbed it back out of the trash, though. Mutti wasn’t so worried about the things I did. She must’ve found it in my stuff after I….” He didn’t complete the sentence.

  Martina completed it in her mind. After you left us. After you left without me. Eventually, she knew, she would feel the full force of her anger against him. But now she just felt numb and empty and alone. She fingered the starfish, following the bumpy ridges, forcing herself to think about what her fingers felt instead of what her heart felt.

  “She left these for you.” Matteo dropped five dice on the table between them. One die was slightly larger than the others; all had been hand-carved out of walrus tusk. From the arctic compound. Helmann hadn’t allowed the children to engage in any form of wagering, and this had extended
to cards and dice. But the ban did not pertain to the foster mothers. Martina could still remember the sound the dice made when Mutti had rolled them in her hand and tossed them on the table, playing some game with the other foster mothers.

  There was an ocarina for Hansel and a mouth-harp for Georg. “To stop them from talking now and again,” said Matteo, half-smiling at the memory. The two had chattered non-stop growing up. For Günter, whose hair was always wild, there was a comb, also carved of walrus tusk. Mutti had set aside a small decorative dagger for Friedrich. “I don’t know why a dagger,” said Matteo. “She didn’t say. She just laughed when I asked.”

  Martina picked it up. Too light for a dagger. And not particularly sharp. “It’s a letter opener,” she said.

  “Ah,” replied Matteo. “That makes sense.”

  Friedrich had been a letter-writer. He wrote tirelessly to heads of state proposing reforms. Martina had no idea if the letters had ever reached their intended recipients. She doubted it. Eventually the children had been introduced to rudimentary computers and taught that people communicated using electronic mail. Which, of course, Helmann’s prodigies had been forbidden to use.

  Martina shook her head. It was dizzying, how sheltered and confined their lives had been.

  “I’m exhausted,” she said, her voice rasping.

  “Where did you say you flew in from?” asked Matteo.

  “Nice. France.”

  “We’re six hours behind you. You’re body thinks it’s … two in the morning. Get some sleep. You can have the bed.”

  Martina didn’t have the strength to argue. She didn’t bother with brushing her teeth or her hair. She crumpled into the small bed in the small bedroom. Mutti was dead and nothing was ever going to be okay again.

  15

  SUPPLY OF CHAMELEONS

  San Francisco, California

  It would have been amusing, of course, to dose de Rochefort with a Neuroplex-laced dart. Fritz had gone so far as to develop one, working off a hand-held tranquilizer gun. But actually using it on de Rochefort would be as dangerous as trying to kill the man. How many assays had Father made upon Waldhart’s life? Fritz couldn’t remember. The stories blurred together. And while some sounded rather … fictionalized, Fritz knew the moral all too well: no direct attacks.

  His own more recent failure at Château Feu Froid still rankled. De Rochefort and that boy had bested him easily. Even when a hostage was in easy reach. So: no direct attacks with his shiny new tranquilizer gun.

  And anyway, a single dose of Neuroplex would only last half a day or so—not long enough to satisfy Fritz. And as for a bullet—well, unless the shot was true, Sir Walter could still escape using his chameleon abilities. And if the shot was true, a bullet delivered far too kindly an end. Fritz wanted to permanently cripple his enemy. A Waldhart who couldn’t disappear at will would be a very miserable Waldhart. A very vulnerable Waldhart. Fritz would be free to indulge in other, lesser, tormentings if de Rochefort couldn’t vanish at will. While less satisfying, these smaller injuries would provide some amusement. Fritz liked to be amused, now and again.

  The problem was, his formulas for initiating radical, cataclysmic change to a chameleon’s genetics were all failures. And he had a limited—very limited—supply of chameleons upon whom to experiment. He’d raced to a nearby cadre of Angel Corps, newly awakened by Father before his fateful voyage to France, and gathered the shocked group of five. Uncle Fritz is here. Uncle Fritz will protect you. It was all a terrible, terrible mistake.

  He thought he’d done a remarkably good job of convincing them that they were innocent, that he was sorry, and that everything would be okay. But then, something most unexpected had occurred the last time Fritz had brought one of these recovered Angels now hidden in the San Francisco headquarters out of hypnotized slumber. (Using his own passwords, thank you very much.) The fool had grabbed a scalpel and taken his own life rather than continue as Fritz’s laboratory specimen. The child had known exactly where to draw the blade. A centimeter of miscalculation and Fritz would have been able to stop him from bleeding out. What a waste that had been.

  And what a mess. For a doctor, Fritz was remarkably sensitive to large amounts of blood. That was Hans’s fault. Hans had known exactly how to torment Fritz when they were children. It was the closest thing Fritz had to a weakness, his distaste for blood. Stupid Hans. Well, stupid Hans was dead, wasn’t he? And Fritz was not. Fritz had outlived all of them.

  Pfeffer didn’t count.

  The second crop of Helmann’s children didn’t count, either. So young, so idealistic, so naïve. And, sadly for Fritz, so few in his control. So few upon whom it was possible to experiment, to create the next step in the journey from Neuroprine to Neuroplex to a permanent solution that would eliminate the chameleon mutation on a chromosomal level.

  Fritz’s latest formulation—so promising—seemed to be failing as well. It made the patient rather ill, something Fritz wouldn’t mind doing to his enemies, but it didn’t do what it was supposed to do: suppress the ability to turn invisible.

  It was enough to make a lesser man grow discouraged.

  Fortunately, Fritz had never numbered himself among lesser men.

  16

  COME AWAY WITH ME

  Sint Maarten, The Caribbean

  When she awoke, it was dark. Not dark like her apartment in Nice. Back home, a clock threw red light across her bed, a smoke detector cast a green glow in one corner of the ceiling, and the lights of Nice pierced the blinds no matter how tightly Martina twisted the bead chain.

  Here, it was truly dark. No light coming from any source. The moon must have been down, or it wasn’t up yet. Martina waved her hand in front of her face. Nothing. It was pitch black.

  What had drawn Mutti to this remote location? Maybe she hadn’t come by choice, but by necessity. It was the sort of place Helmann would own. Remote. Primitive. Practically inaccessible.

  Martina rolled over and hit her head against the wall—not hard enough to really hurt, just enough to make sure she was fully awake. The bed was narrow. Once, she’d slept in beds just like this. Narrow. Confining. Also in keeping with Helmann’s insistence that people grew soft when their surroundings were soft. She reached for the pillow, located it, and bunched it into a ball before settling her head upon it once more.

  Immediately, she smelled two things. Or, rather, two people: Matteo and Mutti. Tears sprang to her eyes. She wanted to toss the pillow across the room. She wanted to hug it fiercely. She went with her second impulse. No one would see her, here, in the dark. She hugged the pillow closer, breathing in the familiar scents. Plumeria—that was Mutti, and a combination of saltwater, lavender, and some musk that belonged to him alone—that was Matteo.

  She ran the back of her hand over her moist eyes. She would not cry for him. These tears were for Mutti and only for Mutti.

  Her heart whispered she was a liar.

  Better a liar than a fool, she whispered back.

  She’d been both, but whereas one left you with a bad taste in your mouth and a dent in your conscience, the other left you suffocating, eighty feet under the surface of the ocean, tied to a cement-filled oil drum.

  An image arose, unbidden—the night she and Matteo had planned their escape. They’d been in the Bahamas at the time, surrounded by other small islands. And if we can eat off the land here, we can eat off the land just as well on another island, Matteo had argued. It was during one of Helmann’s survival camps when they were responsible for their own survival apart from adult assistance. They lived on fish, mostly, and gathered water from the autumnal rainstorms passing over daily. Some days they’d gone to bed very hungry, very thirsty.

  But it hadn’t mattered to her and Matteo. We can live on love, he’d said. The moon had gleamed in his eyes, reflected off his white teeth, and Martina had half-believed what he said. Who could be hungry for food when Matteo’s mouth, hands, hips, beckoned? He was so beautiful. Those wide-set eyes, pale green (“like ja
de,” his mother had said; “like emeralds,” the other mothers had insisted) and fringed with lashes so long he couldn’t wear sunglasses—his lashes bumped into the lenses. If your eyes go bad, you’ll have to trim your eyelashes to wear glasses, Martina had told him. And then she’d peppered those lashes with butterfly kisses.

  She breathed in the scent of the pillow once more: deeply, an addict’s desperate gasp. Oh, this was bad. This was dangerous country.

  She thought again of the night they were supposed to sneak off together. Matteo was a good kayaker. Better than many of Helmann’s own children. The sea kayaks were used for practicing water rescue, but they would serve, Matteo whispered, just as well for escaping their island.

  Come away with me.

  He’d asked for a week.

  Come away with me.

  He’d whispered it between kisses.

  Come away with me.

  And finally: yes.

  She’d agreed. The night was chosen. Martina went to bed fully clothed that night, her pockets stuffed with fish hooks and fishing line wrapped carefully in paper and a plastic tarp for making a water catchment. She waited for the rattle of pebbles on her window. She waited. The moon set. The sky flushed pink. The sun rose.

  And when Martina rose, Matteo was gone.

  Come away with me.

  No message. No explanation. No apology.

  17

  BACK IN THE FOLD

  San Francisco, California

  Fritz’s obsession with his half-brother Pfeffer fell roughly second to his obsession with Waldhart de Rochefort. But it was strong enough that Fritz made a point of tracking Pfeffer’s movements using human and electronic spies.