by Mobi Warren
Copyright © 2019 by Mobi Warren
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Print ISBN: 978-1-54395-962-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-54395-963-5
In loving memory
Mom and Dora
who cherished all creatures
Acknowledgement for use of poem:
“A fish does not drown in water,” by Mechtild
of Magdeburg, translation © 1994 Jane Hirshfield.
From Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (NY: HarperCollins, 1994); used by permission of Jane Hirshfield, all rights reserved.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
HONEYBEE THIEVES
CHAPTER TWO
GOAT BOY
CHAPTER THREE
A STATUE
CHAPTER FOUR
RACE DREAMS
CHAPTER FIVE
PASSING OUT OF HADES
CHAPTER SIX
BEAU
CHAPTER SEVEN
MOUNT OLYMPUS
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE BEE MAKER
CHAPTER NINE
A HURRICANE OF HOPE
CHAPTER TEN
PEBBLES AND POMEGRANATES
CHAPTER ELEVEN
QUITTING
CHAPTER TWELVE
QUANTUM ORIGAMI
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BETRAYAL
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SACRIFICE
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PYTHAGORAS OF SAMOS
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ATTACK
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE FIRE OF CREATION
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
STRAWBERRIES
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
HONEYBEE THIEVES
Yolo County, California; 2036
Melissa and her father leaned their bikes against a fence post and silently dropped to the ground. Inch by careful inch, they belly crawled beneath the lowest rung of barbed wire. Melissa imagined herself flat as a piece of paper and didn’t dare breathe until she was safely on the other side. They entered the almond orchard, one of California’s last, a sea of wilting, honey-scented blossoms. Melissa stood up, inhaled the fragrance, and looked around.
To the West, the sun cast a rosy glow over a pod of clouds. Like sky dolphins, thought Melissa, then frowned. Her absent mother might be watching real dolphins off the coast of Crete right now. Well, best not to dwell on that. It was one of many things she couldn’t change.
The evening air was clammy, made worse by the snug jacket and veiled helmet her father insisted she wear. Even Hermes, her small black dog, was zipped into a protective vest. While her father prepared a smoker to calm the bees, Melissa listened to their soft thrumming. Hermes sat beside her on quivering haunches, ears pricked upward, and sniffed the air as it filled with the resiny scent of burning pine needles. Tendrils of smoke, like ghostly moths, curled and vanished in the dusky spaces between trees.
Her father hadn’t wanted her to join his bee stealing heist, but he’d been too tired to argue.
“You never want me along, Ba,” she’d protested.
“That’s not true.”
“You’re mad that Mom dumped me on you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. If you come, you’ll have to suit up.”
“Okay!””
“And stay out of the way. The bees might be aggressive.”
In the way. She knew that’s how Ba, her father, saw her ever since her mother left for Crete and left Melissa in his care. But she was thirteen. She could help him in his work if he’d only let her.
Now in the orchard as she bent over the stacked crates that housed the bees, her father warned, “Move back, Melissa. I need room.”
His words felt like a rebuke. She moved several yards away, wriggled her gloves off and pulled a piece of origami paper from her jacket pocket. If he wasn’t going to let her do anything, she might as well fold something. An origami bee. She’d been thinking of folding a thousand of them, like a secret prayer for the bees’ survival, and when she was finished, giving them to her father. Maybe then he’d open up and accept her as an ally in the fight for honeybees.
She made a few base folds on the patterned yellow paper and was about to make a new crease when a thin, reedy sound, distinct from the bees, vibrated in her ear. She felt a vague, unsettling feeling that someone else was nearby. She quickly glanced around, but there was nothing to see but her father, Hermes, and the monotonous rows of almond trees. She clapped a hand against her ear, fearing a thirsty mosquito had squeezed its way through her veil. Honeybees were nearly extinct. Large, aggressive mosquitoes were not. But the rising sound took on the shape of a human song. Flute? Bagpipe? The tune was exotic, sinuous as a snake moving across water. There was a haunting sorrow in it that held Melissa half spellbound, half uneasy.
Suddenly, her father’s face was only inches from her own. Hermes snuggled against her leg, whining.
“Melissa, Mel! Can you hear me?” Her father had removed his veil and she was surprised to find her own was off, as well.
“It stopped,” she said blankly.
“What has?” her father asked.
“The flute or whatever was making that music.”
“What music, Melissa?” Her father looked at her perplexed. “We’re the only ones in the orchard.”
Seeing the look in his eyes, Melissa realized that he hadn’t heard any music. A slight chill raced down her spine.
“A seizure,” her father said.
“That’s impossible!” She hadn’t had recurring absence seizures, episodes of lapsed awareness and staring spells, for several months. It couldn’t have been. At her last check-up, her doctor said there was an excellent chance she had finally outgrown her epilepsy.
“Melissa, you were clearly blanked out.”
She couldn’t tell if he was concerned or just annoyed.
She shook her head. “I didn’t blank out. I heard music.” She immediately regretted saying it.
“Melissa, there was no music. You may have had a pre-seizure aura.”
Melissa knew that some epileptics, like her own grandmother, heard sounds or smelled things that weren’t really there, but that had never happened to her.
“We took you off meds too soon.”
“I’m not going back on meds, Ba. They just made things worse.” Of course, she knew that the meds had reduced her staring spells and helped with school, but she hated the side effects. Nausea, headache, dizziness.
Her father shrugged his shoulders. He hated arguments. “Honeybee, we’ll keep an eye on this, okay?”
“Don’t call me honeybee.”
“You never objected to that nickname before.”
“Well, I’m older now, Ba, and anyway, it’s depressing with all the bees dying.” She didn’t add that he seemed to care more about bees than his own daughter. Of course, she cared about the bees, too, and now her father would think she didn’t.
“Was I out long?”
“I don’t think so. Fifteen, twenty seconds maybe. Hermes came and got me.”
Melissa didn’t contradict her father, but she was sure the music had lasted longer than twenty seconds. She reached down to pat He
rmes. He was a shelter dog she’d adopted, a mixed breed that looked like a toy black Lab with the short, blunt tail of a terrier. His personality was pure Jack Russell, headstrong and stubborn. He was also sensitive to her seizures, alerting her parents whenever she had one.
Melissa noticed that her father had already placed the pale blue boxes of the beehive into a large mesh sack. He’d need to lift and then lower the hive carefully over the barbed wire fence. As he sealed the sack, he said, “I should have given you something to do instead of just standing there.” They both knew she was less likely to suffer a seizure when she was physically active.
She remembered then that she had, in fact, been folding an origami honeybee while her father smoked the hive. She could still feel the slip of folded paper tucked in her half-closed fist. She opened her hand and there an origami bee sat, small and complete. That was weird. She was sure she had only started the base folds when the strange music distracted her. Yet there a finished bee sat. It was a new pattern she was proud of. She had tweaked a well known origamist’s design with a few touches of her own to create a honeybee a little more than an inch long, its wings spread open and legs dangling as if it were hovering over a flower.
Her father looked down at the bee and then at her again. His eyes questioned hers.
“I was working on this before, before I blanked out.”
“You took your gloves off?”
“I was bored, Ba.”
To her surprise, the sharp look in his eyes turned to admiration. “That’s a great design, quite elegant.”
I really could fold a thousand, she thought. Dr. Paul Bùi, her father, was a research scientist who specialized in honeybee communication. He was doing everything he could think of, including stealing this hive, to prevent the final extinction of honeybees. Of course, Melissa knew folding a bunch of paper bees wouldn’t bring the real ones back, but it might show her father how much she cared about his efforts. Folding them would be a prayer, a way to hold on to hope, and a way to reach her father.
She tucked the bee in her jacket pocket and helped her father hoist the hive over the fence. They crawled back beneath it.
“What if we get caught, Ba?” Melissa asked as she stood up.
“We won’t. If the owner knew the packers had missed a hive, he’d have an armed guard out here and I would never have brought you.”
A shiver went up Melissa’s spine. She knew as well as her father that no one would relinquish a living hive, not when it could make a hefty profit on the black market or provide one last season of almonds. Almonds, so rare now, they cost several hundred dollars a pound. They strapped the hive onto her father’s bicycle trailer, then folded their jackets and stuffed them in his daypack. Before they hopped on their bikes, her father turned towards her and asked, “You okay for the ride back?”
“I feel perfectly normal, Ba,” she said even though she didn’t at all. She still felt the vague troubling sensation she’d felt in the orchard, as if her nerves had moved out of their normal grooves, as if someone had been watching her from the shadows of the trees. And that strange music. It was unlike any seizure she’d ever had before. She pulled her bike helmet on and nodded to her father after lifting Hermes into his handlebar basket.
“We can take it slow,” her father said.
“I’m okay, Ba. Really.”
They straddled their bikes and started pedaling, waiting until they were well past the orchard to turn on flashing safety lights. Not that it mattered. If any driverless car, the only type allowed on main roads, passed them, its sensors would detect their bikes to avoid a collision. A rain drone whirred overhead and Melissa looked up. The silver-green drone was headed towards her dolphin clouds. It would seed them and maybe there would be light rainfall later that evening. But probably not. The drones did not have a great record of success.
As they cruised side by side, drenched in the reds and golds of a sunset sky, her father’s voice rose above the bikes’ soft glide. “It was a lucky break finding that hive.”
Melissa knew her father had spent weeks sneaking into orchards looking for surviving honeybees. Then today when she’d returned from school, she’d found him excited and ready to take off on his bike. “I found a colony,” he’d simply stated.
Now, as she gazed at both sides of the road, she saw nothing but acre after acre of parched and dying almond trees. Irrigation wells dug decades ago had no more water to give. The reign of the almond orchards was over; the honeybees all dead or disappearing.
“They used to ship bees in, right, Ba? To pollinate the almond trees?”
“Yes, from all over the world, from anywhere bees could still be found. It still makes me angry.”
For decades, billions of bees had been transported like prison crews. Stressed out. Plagued by mites and prone to viruses. Exposed to now-outlawed pesticides. Pesticides, her father had explained, that damaged memory cells in their brains so badly, many bees couldn’t remember the way back to their hives. There had been great hopes that after the pesticides were banned, the bees would rebound. And for some years they did, but something had changed. The bees were weaker. They no longer thrived. They began to abandon their hives again.
Melissa’s absence seizures resulted in gaps of memory, small parcels of time stolen from her. It would be terrifying to forget essential things like how to find her way home, like a lost and damaged bee.
They paused on a hilltop to watch the last sliver of sun dissolve on the horizon beneath sinking layers of tangerine and turquoise sky. Overhead, the sky deepened to royal blue. A first star appeared, then another. Passage of light pollution laws before she was born meant Melissa had always known starry skies, and she could locate and name most constellations.
She turned to her father. “Ba, if the honeybees don’t make it, will we?”
He didn’t answer at once, as if choosing his words with care, then repeated what Melissa already knew. “They helped us pollinate crops for ten thousand years, Melissa. We’ve lost a lot of foods.”
What chance did honeybees have, she wondered. Or humans? She could barely remember the taste of some fruits and vegetables. A good many others she’d never even tasted. Like strawberries. She’d always wanted to taste real strawberries, not the vitamin lozenges that accompanied every meal and supposedly came in flavors like strawberry or kiwi or pumpkin. She’d looked up photos of grocery aisles from twenty years ago on a holo-vid once and been amazed to see bins and shelves stuffed with foods, colors and shapes she’d never known. What she did know was the monotony of peanut butter and bread, rice and beans. Day after day after day. Meals without color.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkening skies, she began to pick out one star after another then reached over to scratch Hermes on the neck. He shifted to expose his abdomen hoping for a belly rub. She obliged him. The rain drone that had passed over earlier zigzagged in the distance aglitter with small lights, still in search of promising clouds like some sleek mammal seeking a mate.
“You can’t snuggle with bees the way you do with a dog,” her father said, “but they were every bit as loyal.”
Melissa leaned over and kissed the top of Hermes’ smooth, black head.
Her father kicked a stone at the side of the road and gripped his handlebars. A salt-scented breeze blew in from the Pacific and ruffled Melissa’s hair as a last, thin beam of sunlight shot in an arc from the horizon as if Melissa were its target. For an instant, a lock of her brown-black hair that fell across her eyes danced with red sparkles. She glanced up at the night sky deepening to indigo. The Milky Way revealed itself like a river of white bees stretched across the heavens. Melissa felt as if she could reach up and scoop a handful. If only the stars were actual bees, she thought, I would gather them and give them back to the world. Magically bring them back. Eat a bowl of strawberries everyday. Make things better with Ba.
Her father leaned over hi
s handlebars and before coasting down the hill, said in a low but resolute voice, “I will do everything I can to pull honeybees back from the brink of extinction. Texas, here we come!”
And I’ll fold a thousand origami bees, Melissa resolved. But why Texas? If only it wasn’t Texas! Far away, steaming hot, unfamiliar Texas. She knew that the next morning, they would clamp their bikes onto a rented solar van rigged to transport the beehive as well as a modest collection of belongings and leave Yolo County, California forever. Her father had mentioned there was an old-fashioned furniture maker in the town they were going to and he planned on buying a pair of rocking chairs crafted from mesquite wood as soon as they were settled. Melissa frowned at the thought. Rocking back and forth on a porch might be her father’s idea of relaxing. Personally, she preferred going for a run. She and her mother used to jog together and Melissa was always seizure free on runs. Her father never joined them. He’d never even bothered going to one of Melissa’s cross-country meets.
They’d be crossing the wide, arid desert, the infamous Hell Zone, to reach Texas. Just the two of them, since her parents were divorced and her archeologist mother, on a dig in Crete, wouldn’t be stateside any time soon. Their destination was the little town of Benefit, home to Benefit College, where her father had accepted a new post. He hadn’t bothered to consult Melissa about the move, simply announced it one evening after another colorless dinner. When she protested, he refused to listen. He left the dinner table for his study, leaving a tearful Melissa to wash up. It had seemed monstrously unfair. Another thing she had no power to change.
The next evening, perhaps in an effort to soften the blow, he’d told her the town was tucked at the foot of a limestone canyon along the curve of the Sabinal River in the heart of Texas Hill Country. “It’s a lovely town,” he said, “one of the first in Texas to go off the grid, years before Climate Chaos forced everyone else to. I’ve rented a little house with a wrap around porch and our next-door neighbors have a small goat farm. That’ll be interesting, don’t you think? I understand a thirteen-year-old boy lives there.”
