Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

“Not everything’s shit,” said Jason, who liked math better than Colin did. Colin liked drawing and reading but not math. “Grandma said Daddy was getting better and pretty soon he can come live with us again.”

Colin said nothing. He liked living here better than he’d liked living with Daddy.

“And Ms. Blake is getting better, too.”

“She isn’t better enough to teach us,” Colin pointed out. “And when she is all better, we’ll be gone and we’ll have a new school and new kids to get used to and that’ll be shit, too.” He thought of Paul Tyson.

“Maybe it will be good,” Jason said, entering an answer on his tablet. “There might be enough kids for a soccer team.”

“I hate soccer,” Colin said, although he’d never played soccer. Right now he hated everything. Everything was shit. And he couldn’t figure out how many apples were left over if you divided seven of them up evenly for Pat and Pam and Cam. Who cared if those stupid girls got any apples anyway?

Jason said, “Why are you so grumpy?”

“I don’t want to move away.”

Jason sighed. “Col—”

“I’m going now.” The idea burst in on him like a firecracker. He could walk out of this room! Grandma could make him leave the camp for good and miss the spaceship launch and everything, but she couldn’t make him sit here and do this math. She had really disappointed him! That’s what she said when he or Jason did something bad, they’d disappointed her, but this time he was the one who was disappointed. No camp, no mice, no Luke or Ava forever and ever. He had a right to be disappointed!

He got up and walked to the door.

“Hey!” Jason said. Luke stared with big eyes.

Colin opened the door and darted through it, real fast, before Grandma could come out of the bathroom. He knew where he was going and he ran as fast as he could. Behind him he heard Jason, still going “Hey! Hey!” and then Luke. Jason was taller and Luke was bigger and all three boys reached the spaceship at the same time.

Jason panted, “What… do you… think you’re doing?”

Colin didn’t answer him. The spaceship door was open, but two workmen inside were doing something to a door and they would just tell him to go away. So he walked—he was too tired now to run—around to the other side of the Venture , where there was no door. There was a guard but he was used to the boys and just went on reading his comic book. Colin slumped to the ground, his back against the side of the ship, which was called the “hull.” It felt warm from sunshine. Then Colin heard it.

Luke did, too. Luke said, “There’s mice in there!”

Colin pressed his ear to the hull. The sounds were clear and high. He rearranged the rows of noises in his head to hear the mouse sounds more clearly. “A lot of mice.”

“They’re mad,” Luke said.

Jason said, “Let’s go in and see them!”

The boys crept back around the ship. The door was still open but the workmen weren’t there. Colin led the way through the airlock, into the big room where some seats were ready and some still in big boxes. To Colin’s surprise, he heard Mr. Stubbins on the bridge. Did that mean Ava was back? Then why wasn’t she at Grandma’s school? Mr. Stubbins said to somebody, “Damn it, there has to be a door on that toilet! Make it fit!”

A workman—Colin could see part of him now, on the bridge—answered. “It won’t fit, sir. It just won’t.”

Luke said, “We shouldn’t be here.”

Jason said, “Luke’s right. Let’s go.”

But Colin didn’t want to go back to math and to Grandma—who was going to be even madder than the mice—and to leaving camp forever. Another firecracker idea burst into his head. “I can’t go! I have to rescue the mice!”

“Rescue?” Jason said.

It was like Brandon and the elephant in the basement! Colin was the hero who would rescue the mice, who were probably mad because they were trapped in their cages. But Colin didn’t have time to explain that because the two workmen, frowning, came back from the bridge. Jason and Luke ran through the airlock and outside. Colin yanked open a door and ducked behind it.

The mice weren’t here. It was a big empty space except for a smaller ship: the shuttle. The walls of the room had cupboards, mostly open and mostly empty. Colin climbed into one and closed the door. He just fit. Perfect—he could stay here until night when everybody left, and then he could go out and rescue the mice.

After a while it got cramped in the cupboard, but Colin stayed in there because that’s what rescuers did. He could hear everything: the mice and the workmen and Mr. Stubbins rumbling to somebody else on the bridge and the ship making its metal-ship sounds and the underground machines and the real ground under that. All of it.

But it was cramped and he wished everyone would go home.

The e-mail arrived while Marianne was in the bathroom. She heard the laptop ping with the specific sound she and Harrison had set up as a signal, and she finished hastily and rushed out to the mess. The boys were gone.

“Jason? Colin? Luke?”

No answer. They’d run off. She was surprised because all three were usually obedient, but Colin and Jason had both been angry with her ever since the announcement that they were leaving the Venture site. She’d deal with them later. This e-mail was the reason she’d been teaching the boys here instead of in the classroom.

Her heart began a slow, arrhythmic bumping in her chest.

Harrison had written using the code they’d worked out, he skeptical that such “cloak-and-dagger histrionics” were necessary, she increasingly sure that they were. Each sentence meant something entirely different than its ostensible content:

My dear Marianne—

Not “dear Marianne” or just “Marianne.” The dead Mus had tested positive for hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome.

I find myself thinking about the time we spent together in the harbor, at Columbia, that day in Central Park…

Harrison’s hybridization analyses of the postmortem material had found either antigens or the viral RNA itself in the mice’s brain, liver and spleen.

… and, especially, that memorable boat ride on the Hudson .

A small groan escaped her. That was the worst. The virus’s genes had altered so that it could infect via a respiratory route. Either that evolution had occurred naturally, or there had been a long, intensive effort to change the genome.

I guess what I’m saying is that I would like to see you again…

Colin’s identification of the striped field mouse had been accurate. Apodemus had been imported to carry the virus here. Or rather, not here—to World.

She had no doubt now that Stubbins had imported and altered the virus, or that World was his target. Apodemus was an incredibly adaptive rodent, and Terrans already knew it was not killed by the spore cloud. Stubbins had stockpiled vaccine in case it was needed for just such an emergency as Colin’s escaped mouse. World would have no vaccines, no natural immunity. Judy’s speculations did not look quite so paranoid now. If Judy was right and World did not know as much genetics as Stubbins’s scientists did, Worlders would be vulnerable to even the threat of the disease. This version of HFRS was the most deadly, with a kill rate of 15 percent—and that was not counting what other microbes the mice might carry as they slipped, silently and pervasively, into whatever World cities looked like. And even if alien microbes killed the mice, the rodents would leave behind droppings, urine, carcasses, all infected with airborne viruses.