Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

Colin was really glad that mice were back in the world.

Marianne visited Ryan every two weeks. A helicopter took her directly from the Venture site to Oakwood Gardens. Ryan never seemed either better or worse. Marianne carried on a mostly one-sided conversation with her son, although she could see he was trying to be present for her, trying to fight his way up from the dark cave into which he had fallen. When the effort exhausted him too much, she left, still smiling, careful to not let her face collapse until she was outside. On a day of wind, threatening snow, she was hurrying across the frozen lawn on her way back to the waiting chopper when Tim Saunders suddenly materialized at her elbow.

She gasped, “How did you get in here?”

“Climbed the fence. Security here is shit. Marianne, I gotta talk to you. It’s urgent.”

Looking at him, Marianne felt a faint echo of the desire that had propelled her for so long. Tim looked good: tanned, lean, his blue eyes intense as always under the tousled fall of mahogany hair. But the echo was faint. And nothing in his face said that he was rushing back to her out of unconquerable love.

“Okay. Talk.” It came out harsher than she intended.

“Yeah, here is good. But first… just let me…” He moved toward her, his hands moving over her body. She jumped back, but then realized he was checking her clothes for trackers. He found one. Carefully he removed it, carried it several yards away, and laid it on the winter grass.

Marianne was outraged—how dare Stubbins? But then she realized she was not as outraged as she should be. A Scud had just destroyed the SpaceX ship. Stubbins needed every single precaution, and privacy versus security was an old, old story.

Tim returned. “Tell your chopper pilot—who’s looking at us hard—that I’m an old flame still carrying the torch, okay? I’ll say this quick. You know I never liked that Earth for Humans gunman outside your apartment right as you came home, or that kid who knew Colin’s real name at his school—both just felt hinky. So I’ve been digging.”

Marianne, already cold in the January wind, went colder.

“The gunman got caught on the building security camera and I—”

“How did you get access to those recordings?”

Tim didn’t even bother to answer. “Got a photo of the guy, did some asking around. He does work for a man who sometimes gets things done for Stubbins. Okay, that’s not much to go on. But the kid who knew Colin’s name and all about you, Paul Tyson, his father is a vice president of something at Stubbins’s Manhattan sales headquarters for the perfumes. And Tyson’s a very old friend of old Jonah himself. And he—no, don’t turn away, listen to me—just got promoted to head honcho on the research project Stubbins is running at his big pharma company in Colorado to find a drug to help all those kids born since the spore cloud. Even though Tyson has no research background.”

“What drug? I didn’t hear about this.”

“Since when does Stubbins tell about his drugs until they’re on the market? That’s gonna be a huge market, a drug that can block unwanted sounds for those kids without turning them into zombies like Calminex does.”

“If anything like that were in the works, Harrison would know about it.”

“Maybe he does. Did you ask him?”

She hadn’t. Tim made a gesture of impatience that she remembered all too well.

“Focus, Marianne. I’m telling you that I think Stubbins arranged both the gunman threat and the Paul kid in order to get you to the Venture site.”

“Why would he do that? I could have gone on writing his web and broadcast content from Manhattan.”

“I don’t know why. That’s for you to find out.”

Marianne wrapped her arms around her body for warmth. “It all seems pretty circumstantial to me.”

“Uh-huh. And you seem like the trusting idiot you’ve always been.” His face softened. “The smartest idiot, though. Listen, I have to go—your pilot is barreling over here to rescue you. I just wanted you to have all the info.” He ran off, faster than the middle-aged and overweight pilot could possibly follow.

Marianne intercepted the pilot and fed him Tim’s romantic lies. Was Tim being paranoid about Stubbins? As her bodyguard, paranoia had been his job description. But… was he right?

She needed to have a talk with Jonah Stubbins. This time, she would keep hunting until she found him.

S plus 6.5 years

The mice were disappointing. The mother mouse did not come home, the striped mouse did not reappear, and the baby mice stayed underground where Colin could hear them but not see them.

The children sat yet again around the mouse hole, waiting for something to happen. Colin was cold, even though he had on his parka and Grandma kept saying how warm this winter was. The trees above them had no leaves, except for the Christmas trees and one big tree with dead brown leaves that just stayed on it and didn’t fall. The little woods had no color, not even in the sky, except for some red berries that Grandma said were poison. Maybe Ms. Blake got sick because she ate the red berries. But she was a teacher so wouldn’t she know better? Colin was worried about Ms. Blake. She was still in the infirmary. Colin had gone there and pressed his ear to the building and he heard lots of things—people, machines, plants—but not Ms. Blake’s voice. He missed it. And he never even saw any mice.

“This is stupid,” Ava said. “We been here a really long time.”

“You only came with us once before,” Jason said, “but we’ve been here lots, waiting. So you can wait, too.”

“It ain’t my fault if Devil Stubbins needed me for more fucking tests!”

“Don’t use bad words,” Colin said.

“Will if I want to.”

“Luke doesn’t like it,” Jason said.

Ava looked from Colin to Luke. It was true that Luke didn’t like any kind of fighting or cursing. And it was also true that Ava liked Luke best, even though he was slow and Jason was their leader. Ava was always kind to Luke. Colin didn’t understand that but at least it was something good. He went back to watching the mouse hole.

And then he heard it. “Shhhh! She’s coming!”

All four children froze. Luke and Ava turned just their heads, their bodies still, in the direction of the noise. Jason followed their gaze. He couldn’t hear what Colin heard, the high screeeeee, but in another minute they all saw her.

The mommy mouse staggered from a bunch of dead leaves toward the hole. She fell down, got up, fell down again. Her brown fur—no long stripe on her back, she was just a regular mouse—was all weird, standing up in patches. She was really skinny. All at once her body started to shake hard as she kept making that awful noise: Screeeeeeeeee! And then she gave a huge shake and lay still.

Nobody spoke until Jason said, “I think she’d dead.”

Ava said, “I don’t see no blood.”

“Maybe she died of sickness,” Jason said.

Colin didn’t like that, because of Ms. Blake. What if she died, too? He stared at the dead mouse.

Luke burst into tears. “Without their mom, the baby mice will die!”

“No, they won’t,” Ava said. “We’ll take care of them. Don’t you cry, Luke.”

“We don’t know how to take care of baby mice,” Jason said.

Then Colin had an inspiration. “We’ll take them all to Grandma! She used to have mice at her work, she told me. She’ll know how to take care of the babies, and maybe she can even fix the mommy mouse!”

Jason stared at the corpse. “I don’t think so. It’s pretty dead.”