“It’s okay,” Cara said. “I got him back.”
Her mother yanked her back, grabbing Cara up and away with a violence that hurt her neck. Cara was back behind the counter, her feet off the floor, her mother’s arms pressing the air out of her almost before she realized they were moving. Her father pushed them both behind him. She didn’t understand why he had a knife in his hand.
“Gary?” her mother said. “What the fuck is that?”
“I see it,” her father said. “It’s real.”
Cara couldn’t speak. She didn’t have the air. She wriggled against her mother’s grip. She had to explain, to tell them what was going on. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.
“I want a hug too,” Xan said.
Xan took another awkward step forward, still and then the flicker of motion, then still again. Her father yelled, a deep, ragged sound too big for the man she knew. He lunged toward Xan, knife shining in his fist, and terror flooded Cara’s blood. She kicked at her mother hard, and felt the blow connect. The grip around her released a little.
“Stop it!” Cara screamed. “What are you doing?”
Xan blocked the knife with his hand, the gray skin opening and black blood pouring from his palm. Xan’s eyes went wide with shock. Her father barreled forward, still shouting wordlessly. He grabbed Xan’s funeral whites and lifted the little boy off the floor. Cara pushed against her mother’s neck hard, and stumbled to the floor. Her mother was keening now, a high, tight sound of panic. Her father had the pantry door open. He threw Xan into it and slammed the door shut, still yelling. There were words in it now. He was shouting, Leave my family alone.
“What is the matter with you?” Cara shouted. She punched her father’s back and then froze. She’d never hit him before. She’d never hit anyone before. He didn’t even notice. He grabbed one of the kitchen stools and used it to jam the pantry door closed. Xan banged against the door harder than Cara would have thought he could. Her mother yelped and started cursing fast and low, almost under her breath. It sounded like praying.
Tears were streaming down Cara’s cheeks, but she wasn’t sad. All she felt was a powerful, growing outrage.
“I brought him back!” she yelled. “He was dead and I took him to the dogs, and they fixed him!”
“Dogs?” her father said. “What dogs?”
“The dogs that came after the stick moons turned on,” Cara said. There was so much they didn’t understand, and the words were like trying to drink through too thin a straw. The meaning wouldn’t all fit. “They fixed Momma bird and the drone and they fixed Xan because I asked them to, and he’s back. I brought him back and you hurt him!”
She heard her mother somewhere behind her, talking into her handheld. I need the military liaison. It’s an emergency. Cara’s outrage and impatience felt like venom in her blood. She pushed at the stool, trying to get the pantry door open again. Her father grabbed her shoulders, pulled her close until his face was the whole world.
“That’s not your brother,” her father said, biting off each word. “That’s. Not. Xan.”
“It is.”
“The dead don’t come back,” her father said.
“They do here,” Cara said.
“His eyes,” he said, shaking her as he spoke. “The way he moves. That’s not a human, babygirl. That’s something else wearing my little boy’s skin.”
“So what?” Cara said. “He’s knows everything Xan knows. He loves everything Xan loves. That makes him Xan. How can you do this to him just because he’s not perfect!”
Her mother’s voice came, hard as stone. “They’re sending a force from town.”
“The soldiers?” Cara said, pulling away from her father’s grip. “You called the soldiers on him? You hate the soldiers!”
She grabbed at the stool again, but her mother lifted her from behind, hauled her feet off the floor and carried her back toward her room. Xan was calling from the pantry, his voice muted and rough with tears and confusion. Cara tried to twist back toward him. Tried to reach for him.
Her mother pushed her into her room and blocked the door with her body. When she looked down at Cara, her expression was blank and hard. “It’s going to be all right,” her mother said. “But you have to stay here until I get this under control.”
A rush of thoughts fought for Cara’s voice—It was under control and Why are you making this a bad thing? and You let Daddy cut Xan—and left her sputtering and incoherent. The door closed. Cara balled her hands, screamed, and pounded the wall. Her parents’ voices came from the house in clipped, hard syllables that she couldn’t make out. She sat on the edge of her futon, bent double, and put her head in her tingling hands. Her blood felt bright with rage, but she had to think.
The soldiers were coming. Her parents were going to let them take Xan away. Make them take Xan away. They’d say the dogs were bad. Dangerous. They might hurt them.
All because it didn’t work like this on Earth.
The room was filled with her things. Her clothes—clean and folded in the dresser and worn and scattered on the floor by the hamper. The picture over her bed of dinosaurs running from a man in a big pink hat. The picture she’d made when she was seven from Laconian grass and paste, with Instructor Hannu’s note—Good work!—beside it. The tablet with her book on it. She scooped it up, turned it on. It was still open to the page of Ashby Allen Akerman in Paris. The old woman feeding bread to the birds. She put her fingertips on the picture. It wasn’t a real woman. It wasn’t even a real painting. It was just the idea of an idea. It didn’t have anything to do with her life, and she didn’t lose anything by letting it go.
She closed the book and opened the recording function. She felt the time slipping past, but she took a long look around the room all the same. Her whole life was here, written in little notes and objects that added up to a story that only she would understand.