SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Sam nodded mutely, clearly confused about where code investigation fell in the spectrum of “being a big boy.”

Becca stepped forward. “Mum—”

Candice’s head whipped up, and the sweetness vanished from her face. “I don’t want to hear any more of it. You’re under my roof. You’ll put that thing away when you get home. Or better yet, throw it out.”

Becca clenched her jaw, but couldn’t find a retort. Candice had always hated Dad’s obsessions. It didn’t matter what it was: if she didn’t understand it, it wasn’t allowed.

Candice lowered her voice theatrically. “Julie needs him right now while she gets better, not silly distractions.”

“I thought it was interesting,” Sam mumbled.

“It’s just broken, my sweetling. There are more important things right now.”

Sam barely said two words the whole drive home. He hunched in the back seat, hugging his knees and smearing ink-stained tears across his cheeks.

“Careful with those,” Becca joked, nodding to the pile of crumpled typewriter paper she’d retrieved from Candice before they left. “You don’t know what they say, yet. It could be important.”

He didn’t reply. To him, she was still just a face from a laptop. What did Dad do when I was this upset? He loved his puzzles, his what-ifs. Sometimes he’d be so engrossed he’d forget to eat, chewing pen lids into scraps until Candice dragged him down to dinner. Becca smiled to herself, then clenched her cheek muscles in place.

What if Julie does wake up? Even just some of her, she might still be Julie.

I can’t live with Candice again .

Nine days left. Then she had to be on a plane home. Or not. She shook her head. Focus on Sam. His smile made Julie’s fate—and her own—less terrifying. Besides, Julie had named her godmother. He was Becca’s responsibility, now.

“You know what you need to do?” she asked in her best detective voice as they pulled up at the Earl’s Court Road traffic light. “We need more data. For instance, there are more letters than keys. So does each key match a certain set of letters? Is there a pattern?”

Sam frowned. “I don’t know,” he said huskily.

“You don’t know?” Becca turned and gaped at him, mock-aghast. “Well, what is it we do, when we don’t know something?” Sam shook his head mutely. Becca mimicked her father’s exuberance: “We find out!”

The slightest of smiles tweaked Sam’s cheek. Becca leaned between the front seats and whispered. “I won’t tell her if you won’t.”

Becca blurred through the morning and afternoon cleaning walls and light switches and other things that didn’t need cleaning, to the plunks of Sam on the typewriter in the living room. Until—

“Auntie! I figured it out! And it’s talking to me!”“

Becca raced in, half-expecting he’d taken it apart.

Sam sat in the living room surrounded by open books of dense text, studiously writing in his Buzz Lightyear notebook.

“What do you mean, kiddo?” Becca peered over his shoulder.

“You said I should work out whether the same keys make the same symbols—they don’t,” he announced, in a tone like he was receiving the Nobel Prize. “So I thought it might be random, but it’s not. I counted one hundred and twenty-seven different letters, and there are patterns. Lots of patterns.”

Becca remembered to close her mouth. She and Julie had played with this for months as kids. How had they never noticed that? And Sam had, all by himself?

“So I looked through Dad’s old books Mum kept, they tell you how to crack codes, by looking for patterns and how many letters and whether the patterns are big or small, and—” he ran out of breath and gulped air. “There was one where it’s not based on letters but on sounds. Fo-somethings.”

“Phonemes,” Becca murmured, half-entranced. She flipped through the books next to Sam—cryptography books. His father had been Military Intelligence. Julie had never said doing what, only that he’d had a knack for languages and numbers.

“That’s why there are so many letters. It’s writing out exactly what he said, how it sounded. And then it started talking to me.”

“Now Sam,” Becca heard her mother’s tone in her voice and winced.

“I’m not lying! Look!” He pushed his notebook under her face. Becca frowned at the jumble of English words.

“It’s backwards,” Sam said helpfully. “The words, I mean. They started at the end of the message.”

“Why is it backwards?”

“Why is it writing in an alien language?”

“Point made.” She took the notebook. “Uncle Sam,” she murmured, reading backwards. “I guess Uncle Sam came through after all, I can see the shuttles flying.” A grin spread over her face at the beautifully impossible—her father’s grin. “That’s not you, Sam. That’s what people sometimes call America, like it’s a big brother. I think he’s a soldier or something.”

“Like Dad, in Afghanistan?”

Becca caught her breath. Careful .

“I don’t think this is your father, sweetheart.”

How do you know? It could be.

“Is he in trouble?”

The phone rang.

Digging her mobile out of her jeans, Becca silently thanked the universe for the reprieve. “Could be, but it sounds like reinforcements have arrived. Hello?”

“Ms. Willoway? This is Cromwell Intensive Care.”

The world paused. Becca sank onto a plate on the coffee table, legs quivering.

“Your sister is awake.”

“She’s going to be fine,” Candice’s insistence shrilled across Julie’s vacant stare.

“It’s brain damage, Mum,” Becca whispered. “You can’t make it better. It doesn’t just heal like a broken bone. You don’t know if she’s still in there.”

Candice rounded on Becca. “Of course she is! She just needs rest. We’ll take her home this afternoon, we’ll get her better.”

Becca frowned. “Straight from the ICU? Don’t they want to keep her for observation or rehab?”

“I insisted. She needs her family, not faceless caretakers. They’ll send a physio-nurse to check on her twice a day. They gave me a list of things…I can manage, just like with your father, when he went.”

Candice really does love her. And you. And Sam.

Becca stared at the vacant woman who looked like her sister. Julie’s eyes followed people when they spoke, and she moved her lips as spittle slowly slipped out the corner of her mouth. Gone, though, was the laugh, the flash-in-the-pan grin, the need to be into everything, understanding everything, the intensity when she listened like she was reading off the back of your skull. Gone was the banter which wound up offending people as often as not, the wit that invented codenames for Candice’s tactics in their Skype calls. Gone, even, was the bitter resignation at returning to Candice’s clutches a widow, Sam in tow, and that steel-eyed determination to climb free again. Nothing in this stranger’s face was Julie.

Becca crumpled against the bed, but the tears wouldn’t come.

Candice wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pressing her into her perfumed jacket, and soothed the nape of her neck. “She’s going to be fine. You’ll see,” she murmured in her soft voice, the motherly voice from Becca’s childhood fevers. She pulled a tissue from her purse and gently blotted at Becca’s dry cheeks.

“Sam shouldn’t see her like this.” Becca glanced out the window where Sam quietly wrote a letter to the lost soldier who might be his father.

“She’s his mother. He’ll love her whatever she looks like.”