* * *
It was one of those things. An accident. If any of a thousand details had been just a little different, no one would have even noticed it. The soldier who’d been driving the transport had indulged in a couple beers with his lunch, so his reaction times were just that much delayed. Xan and Santiago and the other boys had decided to play football instead of tag, so there was a ball that could take a wild kick. Xan had been nearest the road, so he’d been the one to run out to retrieve it. The whole thing was over before anyone understood it had begun. Like that, her little brother was dead, and the drone and Momma bird and the dogs didn’t seem important anymore.
Cara sat while the soldier explained it all. Santiago Singh stood at attention, weeping as he retold all he’d seen like the good little soldier he was. Her father lurched out of the room at some point. Her mother dropped her favorite serving bowl, the fragments scattering across the floor. They were like moments out of a dream, connected because they were about the same thing, more or less. But she couldn’t have said which happened first. Which one led to the others. Xan was dead, and it shattered time for her. It broke everything.
Admiral Duarte sent his condolences. This was a lapse of discipline that should never have happened. The admiral had already ordered the drunk soldier’s execution. Cara’s family would be put first on the list for a place in the new housing facilities, and Cara would be guaranteed a place in the academy when it opened. The admiral understood that nothing could compensate for their loss, but the soldiers would do what they could. With the family’s permission, the admiral would like to attend the wake. Someone had said, Of course, but Cara didn’t know if it had been her mother or her father. She might even have said it herself.
The town didn’t have a mortuary. In the years they’d been on Laconia, there hadn’t been more than a handful of deaths, and none of them had been a child. Not until now. No one seemed to know what to do or how to go about it. Cara had never been to a funeral before. She didn’t know what to expect.
They brought Xan home that afternoon, and his body had already been cleaned. Someone had found or made a burial gown for him, white cloth from his throat down to his bare feet. They put him in the front between the door and road on a table. His eyes were closed, his hands folded on his belly. Cara stood at his side, looking down at him and trying to feel. Everything in her seemed to have gone numb.
To her, Xan looked like he was sleeping. Then he looked like he wasn’t really Xan, but only a statue of him. A piece of art. Cara found she could flip her brain between seeing him one way and then the other, like he’d become an optical illusion. Her brother, but only asleep. Something not alive, but also not her brother. Back again. Anything except the two together: Never both Xan and dead.
People from town came. Edmund Otero. Janet Li. The Stover family, with Julianne Stover carrying her new baby on one hip. They brought food. A couple of times, they tried singing hymns, but the songs died out before they could really take root. At one point, Mari Tennanbaum seemed to well up out of the crowd and grab Cara in an awkward hug, like Cara was supposed to be comforting her instead of the other way around. Then Mari faded back into the swirl of bodies and hushed conversation. Cara went back to looking at her brother’s corpse.
There was something. Not a bruise really, but where a bruise would have been if Xan’s blood hadn’t stopped where it was. A discoloration on his head. Cara couldn’t get the idea out of her mind that this was where Death had touched him.
She didn’t see the soldiers arrive so much as hear it. A change in the voices around her. When she thought to look up, Admiral Duarte was there, silhouetted by the light spilling out of their doorway as he talked to her parents. It was the first time she’d seen him in person and he wasn’t as tall as she expected. A centimeter or two shorter than her father. His uniform was perfectly tailored. His pockmarked cheeks made him look older than he probably was.
He was talking to her parents when she saw him, his head bent forward like he was putting all his attention into listening to them. It was a little bit like having a Greek god or a character out of history show up. It wasn’t the only unreal thing about the evening, but it was one among others.
Her mother said something she couldn’t hear, and the admiral nodded and touched her arm as he replied. He shook her father’s hand, neither man smiling. When he walked in her direction, she thought it was to see Xan. To view the body, if that was the phrase. She was surprised when he stopped in front of her.
“Cara?” The way her name sat in his mouth, it was like he was making sure he had the right person and also talking to someone that was his equal. His eyes were soft brown. She could see the sorrow in them. “My name is Winston.”
“I know,” she said like she was accepting an apology. Letting him off the hook.
He shifted to look at Xan. They were silent for a few seconds. He sighed. “I wish I could make this better. I’ve lost people I love before. It was very hard.”
“Why?” she asked, and her voice was sharper than she’d expected. It wasn’t a fair thing to ask. She wasn’t ever sure quite what she meant by it other than who the hell was he to come to her brother’s funeral and talk about his own pain. Winston took the question in, pursing his lips like he was sucking on it. Tasting it.
“Because I hate feeling powerless,” he said. “I hate being reminded that the universe is so much bigger than I am. And that I can’t always protect people.” He shifted to look at her directly again. Like he actually cared about her reaction to this explanation. She understood why the soldiers would follow him. Why they all loved him.
“Would you undo it,” she asked, “if you could? If you could bring him back?”
Maybe he heard something in the question. Maybe it was only that he was listening to her so deeply. He paused, thought. “I believe that I would, yes. I need your family to be well. To be part of what I’m doing here.”
“Taking over Laconia?”
“And everything that comes after that. I want to keep people safe. Not just here but everywhere. The people on Laconia, not just the ones who came with me but all of us, are my best chance to do that. And yes, if I could save your
brother, I would. For him, and for your parents, and for you. If I could wave a magic wand and go back in time to keep him off that road? I would do it.”
“You killed the soldier who killed him. Didn’t you need him too?”
“Not as much as I needed you and your family to know that your brother mattered to me. I’m the government here. I imposed that. I didn’t ask your permission first. That puts some obligations on me. It means I have to show sincerity and respect for our rules, even when that requires doing something I might not want to do. I don’t have the right to compromise.”
“I think I understand that.”
“We have to be one people,” he said. He sounded sad. “There’s no room for tribes on Laconia. That’s how they do it back in Sol system. Earth and Mars and the Belt. That’s what we’re here to outgrow.”
“Everything is different here,” Cara said, and the admiral nodded as though she’d understood him perfectly, then touched her shoulder and walked away.
Behind her, someone was weeping softly. She didn’t turn to see who. For the first time since she’d come home, she felt almost clearheaded. When she put her hand on Xan’s foot the same way she used to when she woke him up, his body was cold.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “I know how to fix this.”
Her parents were in the kitchen with Mari Tennanbaum, each of them with a squat glass of wine. Usually her father would be making jokes about it being vintage fifteen minutes ago, but now he didn’t seem to notice it was in his hand. The missing joke made her sad, because it meant he was sad.