Wilders

by Brenda Cooper

  Lou was still seventeen. In a few months she would be an adult. Lou’s head rested on top of Coryn’s and Coryn’s arms circled her lower waist, her fingers running along Lou’s backbone.

  Coryn watched the crowd seethe with uniforms and onlookers. When Paula finally came back outside, she wore one of her strict robotic expressions. It was the same one she used when she was furious with Coryn or Lou. “You can’t go in. I’ll take you up on the roof, and we’ll get some food, and we’ll wait together. The police will come find us as soon as they can.”

  Coryn didn’t want to see whatever Lou had seen. Lou never came undone like this, never lost it, never cried. As frightened as she was about her parents, seeing Lou cracked into pieces was . . . impossible.

  Lou always led. Always. Except now Lou trudged behind Paula with her head down, shoulders drooping, one hand holding Coryn’s loosely.

  Paula drove them slowly and inexorably through the gathering crowd and away from the sirens. She took them into the apartment building next door to theirs and up the elevators to the roof. She had them move like they had when the girls were little, all in a line: Lou in front, then Coryn, then Paula watching over them both.

  Lou sobbed and sobbed, blowing her nose. Still, she led them carefully through the patio tables. Coryn tripped on a table-leg and Paula caught her halfway down, a graceful arm appearing for Coryn to grasp onto before she landed in a flowerbed. A short bridge joined two rooftops. As they crossed it, Coryn looked down to where the revolving colored lights illuminated the gathering crowds and saw her bicycle on the ground, unlocked and orphaned. She had a sudden urge to turn around and put it away.

  A few of their neighbors had come up onto the roof as well, people Coryn recognized but didn’t know well. One couple got up as if planning to speak to them, but Paula blocked them, murmuring soothing words.

  The robot directed the girls to a table in the middle of the roof and they sat silently.

  A faraway look came over Paula, her eyes fastening on the horizon, or maybe on the thin ribbon of bridge far above them. Coryn knew the look; Paula was getting a lot of information and processing it. She’d notice if her charges left, or any kind of danger approached, but she probably wouldn’t demand anything from Coryn and Lou for a few minutes.

  Lou looked even more lost in thought than the robot. A cat worked its way over to the girls, rubbing up against them both and head-butting Lou until Lou dropped her death-grip on Paula’s hand and touched the cat’s cheek. The cat stayed near them for a long time, circling and then stopping for pets and then circling them again. Its wide, golden eyes matched the brown and gold stripes on its tail and forelegs and contrasted with the brown fur that felt like silk under Coryn’s fingers.

  “Be careful,” Paula admonished them. “That’s got to be someone’s pet gene mod.”

  “Why?” Lou asked.

  “It’s too perfect,” Paula said.

  “Like you?” Coryn shot back, immediately regretting it.

  “Of course.”

  She didn’t call for an apology the way she usually did, but Coryn gave her one anyway. “I’m sorry, silly robot.” She had to work hard to get the word through her thick throat.

  Paula smiled in approval and watched the girls entertain themselves with the cat until it appeared to get bored and walked off.

  Even though she hadn’t known the cat, she felt bereft as it walked away and left them alone. They were lost. Alone. Everything had just changed.

  Eventually, two policewomen made their way carefully through the crowded rooftop, one for each girl. The youngest one knelt by Coryn, a beautiful woman with the dark eyes and the old-amber complexion of an East Indian. “Hello,” she said in a honey-soft voice, a sad voice, “I’m Mara.” She knelt down so her eyes were even with Coryn’s. “You know that something happened to your parents?”

  “They’re dead,” Coryn saw no reason to pretend she didn’t know. She’d known since she saw the blood on Lou’s shirt.

  The policewoman’s eyes softened, and she bent her head and made notes on her slate.

  “Why did they die?” Coryn asked.

  “Do you mean how?” Mara asked.

  She already knew that. Lou had told her they were killed. But they were just normal people, and that shouldn’t have happened. “No. I want to know why.”

  Mara shook her lovely head; her thick, dark hair swished back and forth across her navy-blue uniform. She took Coryn’s hands in hers. Her long nails were painted a bright pink, and the little finger and the thumb on her right hand had started chipping.

  Everything Coryn could see looked like that, colorful and crisp. The street lights shone unusually bright, with pale haloes around them. The cat stood on the edge of the roof, flicking its long tail back and forth. The beer in a nearby glass glowed yellow-orange.

  Her parents were dead.

  Mara reached for her, but Coryn turned away. Paula stood right behind her, opening her arms. Coryn leapt up into them. She gave the robot her weight as if she were still a small child, clutching Paula as if her life depended on it. She buried her head in the robot’s soft shoulder and squeezed her eyes shut.

  If only they were back on top of the bridge, with the wind blowing beyond them and the possibility of a whale.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Coryn stood at the single small window in the room she and Lou shared in the orphanage, leaning on the silvery sill and looking down at a ragged community garden three stories below her. Two or three of the raised beds were bright with flowers, but the rest looked ragged and thin. One held only brown bushes too far gone for recovery but not yet weeded out. It bugged her; weeding was one of the city’s assigned chores she had chosen when she was ten, and she had loved to weed for years, making up silly songs as she cleaned and straightened beds. The orphanage’s chore list was all internal, like bathroom cleaning and neatening the pantry, but weeds still demanded to be pulled.

  The room smelled of antiseptic and something flowery, and the cold glass and metal reminded her of a doctor’s office instead of a home.

  She was alone. Lou and Paula had gone together to find them something to drink besides water.

  An orphanage. Who would have thought they could end up someplace so cold? It all seemed surreal.

  If her parents were still alive, if this was one of their homes, the room would be full of color. Her mother liked browns and off-whites, with teal accents and soft lighting.

  Coryn still couldn’t remember the last thing she’d said to her parents.

  Old, good memories surfaced over and over. Her mom reading to her on her fifth birthday. Her dad feeding them juice and fresh bread from the corner bakery for breakfast.

  The hole where her parents had been ran deep. Even though she’d managed to sleep last night, it was digging at her consciousness again right now, making her think silly little things, like how her father would have taken some of the garden, even just a row, and cleaned it up. He would have done that even if they weren’t staying. But what did it matter now? He would never garden again.

  She glanced at her wristlet. No messages. Nothing. No one came to see them. People Coryn had thought of as friends had messaged them a few times, awkward little messages that soon stopped.

  She cringed as she heard the high whine of a small drone through the half-closed doorway. It belonged to one of the other orphans. Ghit. He was such a deep Autie the city had assigned him a keeper drone, and apparently it had tried to find the noisiest one possible. One of the other girls, one of the mean ones, named Justina, told her and Lou that he’d been beaten so often as a child that his parents had given him up and moved away.

  Ghit poked his head into the doorway. A deep red scar marred his left cheek and his gaze always looked wary. “Killed parents.”

  He meant, “Did you find out who killed your parents?” but he never spoke in full sentences. Lou was always after the answer to that particular question, but Coryn was always the one Ghit asked. He asked her a few t
imes every week. She sighed. “I don’t know. When I find out, I’ll kill them.”

  He looked fascinated, as if he’d never heard her say that before. “Could you?”

  “Of course not.”

  Thankfully, Ghit withdrew and pulled the door closed behind him.

  She had no idea what she’d do when she found out. She just wanted to be busy and get past the grief that nagged at her. Lou had turned it to anger, and the anger to nervous action, but try as she might, Coryn couldn’t really get angry about it. Just sad.

  Surely anger would be easier.

  She returned to staring down at the entry street, willing her sister and her protector to come home soon.

  Paula came back in half an hour, carrying ginger-flavored drinks from a corner store and sweet plums from one of the nearby roof orchards. Lou didn’t follow until long after dark. As soon as she came in, she grabbed Coryn by the hand and walked her outside. The orphanage’s back porch jutted onto a small lawn beside a thin street that hardly ever saw any car traffic. As they stepped through the door, a long ribbon of bicycles spun by, flashing spandex and spinning blue and sparkling gold wheel lights. In their wake, it grew quiet, windless, and hot.

  Lou led Coryn past the chairs and sat on the railing, looking up at the pale, fuzzy stars in the night sky. “Do you still want to know how Mom and Dad died?” she asked in a low whisper. “Really want to know?”

  Coryn suddenly felt as cold as if she’d just inhaled a whole scoop of frozen cream. She stuttered. “If we know, maybe Ghit will stop asking.”

  Lou didn’t even crack a smile. She seemed infused with sadness, her face still and shocked. She brushed a strand of hair away from Coryn’s eyes and, finally, looked directly at her. “Do you?”

  “Yes.” Her voice sounded small so she said it again, a little louder. “Yes!”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “So tell me anyway. I can take it. I can tell you hate it. I can see it in your eyes and I can smell it on your breath. Whiskey?”

  “I only had a little.” Lou looked down at her feet. “I needed courage to say this to you.”

  Coryn chewed on her lower lip. “All right.”

  “Remember how much Mom hated the city?”

  Coryn sighed. “Yes.” Lou hated it too, but Coryn didn’t bother to say so. They both knew. “Mostly she didn’t hate the city itself, but she hated living with so many people.”

  Lou raised an eyebrow. “I think that too, but I didn’t know you picked it up.”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  Lou laughed a little, and exhaled; her breath smelled like stale beer. Coryn wrinkled her nose.

  “The coroner ruled on it last night.”

  And clearly Lou knew what they had said and had swallowed the secret until now. Coryn played along. “So how did you find out what they said?”

  “I have a new friend—he’s wicked good with city morgue data.”

  “Yuck.”

  “There’s a lot of reasons to know about dead people. Like why they died, and if they died of a disease or if old age got them . . .”

  “You’re procrastinating,” Coryn said. “I told you I can take it.” She stood up, pacing back and forth on the uneven surface, angry at Lou for holding out on her.

  Lou drew herself up to her full height—still a head taller than Coryn—and stopped looking at the stars long enough to meet Coryn’s eyes. The low light turned her blue eyes colorless as glass. Her lips thinned to lines; she looked more like a grownup than she usually did. “They said . . .” Lou hesitated. Her face screwed up and the next words came out more slurred than any of the others had. “They wrote in the report that . . . Mom and Dad killed themselves. Or more precisely, they killed each other. A mutual suicide pact kind of thing.”

  “On my graduation day?” Coryn blurted.

  Lou had the grace not to comment. She clasped her hands and rested her chin on her raised index fingers.

  Coryn sank down into one of the chairs. The weight that had followed her around since that awful day drew her down so far she felt as if she might sink through the chair and through the painted concrete floor of the porch and into the earth and worms below, and on through to the very center of the earth.

  Above her, as if speaking from far away, Lou said, “I didn’t know she hated the city more than she loved us.”

  Unbidden, Coryn’s arms and legs curled inward; she sank to the porch, a small compact ball, heavy with grief, protecting a hole in the very center of herself. This was worse than the pain the day they died. Deeper. That had been incomprehensible, and this she understood. Of course this was what they had done.

  Lou stared down at her, expressionless.

  Coryn couldn’t move.

  Lou extended a hand, which looked outsized through the haze of Coryn’s tears. She reached up and took it. Lou’s hand felt strong, warm, sweaty, and alive.

  Lou pulled, but she couldn’t budge Coryn, still curled tightly except for the one arm extending up toward Lou.

  “Stretch your legs,” Lou almost yelled. “Open your shoulders.”

  Coryn tried.

  “Get up!” Lou took in a deep breath. “Let it go.”

  And then, as if following Lou’s commands, all of the weight and all the grief fell away from her. In its place, anger pulled her up to standing, made her stomach sour and her fists clench.

  Anger felt good. She’s been hungry for the heat of it, for the life that came with it.

  She wanted to hit something.

  Her mother had left her for no good reason at all.

  Depression. Her mother had even said the word a few times.

  Depression. Depression. Depression.

  Coryn had thought it was like a cold. Her mom took medicine for it, and shouldn’t that have made it all better?

  She stood in the warm city night under the stars and she was mad as hell. She stood there for a lot of breaths. Sweat ran down her shoulder blades and the dried streaks of her tears cracked on her cheeks. Her balance began to come back, and she smelled the clean, oily air and heard the hum on traffic a few streets away. She turned to Lou, and quite carefully stated, “Fuck.”

  Lou listed to the right.

  Coryn took her in her arms and rocked her. It felt like holding a tree while it tried to fall, but then Lou found her feet. Coryn rocked her back and forth, rocking her bigger, older sister like a baby.

  Lou had always been the strong one, but right now—in this minute—Coryn was stronger. She could feel the shift, big as an earthquake. She felt herself giving to Lou and Lou taking.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Coryn woke up in a cold sweat, unable to sleep. She stood up and stared out at the empty, dark street. Lou was about to graduate. Coryn had three years left here, and those would be alone. Surely Lou wouldn’t stay here after her finals. She hardly ever stayed now—she wasn’t in her bed yet, and it must be after midnight.

  What if she didn’t even stay close?

  Every graduating student had to declare what they were doing next by the time they graduated. They could pick a job, a year of approved travel, more school. An infinite number of choices, nearly. But they had to choose something. The city provided a basic stipend for everyone. The lowest was basic-basic, and the city added to it for risky or difficult careers, or subtracted as people made money working for corporations or in their own businesses.

  No one with an able body and mind was allowed to do nothing before they were old. Sloth had been experimented with right after the basic program started, and nothing had turned out to be a lousy thing to pay people for.

  So Lou had to choose something.

  Light came on slowly, brightening the tiny room a little. Lou’s bed was still neatly made, ready for morning inspection. Paula stood in the corner, watching the doorway. “Were you dreaming?” she asked.

  “No. Worrying. What will Lou do?”

  “She hasn’t told me anything.”

  Which meant Paula mi
ght know something, but if so, she wasn’t saying. “Damned robot.”

  Every time Coryn had asked Lou, Lou had turned the question around on her. Since she had no idea what she wanted to do, and two years to decide in, she refused to answer, so neither of them had an opening for the very real conversation Coryn felt sure they needed to have. She glared at Lou’s empty bed before she fell back down into her own and pulled the covers over her head.

  The very next morning, Lou asked Coryn out to breakfast. She treated Coryn to Sirella’s, one of the best breakfast places within three miles of the orphanage. Lou wore new-printed jeans and a simple long-sleeved shirt and an old denim jacket she’d loved for years. She had pulled her red hair up in braids and piled it on her head. She didn’t dress up often; it worried Coryn. When she suggested, “Coryn, have the French toast and fresh blueberries,” Coryn shuddered, even more sure this breakfast wouldn’t end well.

  It wasn’t that Coryn minded the comfort food. Dependent students were paid far less than workers, and she hadn’t had such rich food for at least a week. But surely this breakfast was about Lou’s choice, and it would change things. It mattered.

  When Lou hadn’t revealed anything by the time they were halfway through breakfast, Coryn’s food began to taste like paper. She took a deep breath and asked, “So what are you going to do?”

  Lou put her fork down. “You know I hate it here.”

  “Lots of people don’t like the city, but they stay.”

  “You love it.”

  Coryn swallowed. “It’s not as easy to love as it used be.”

  She didn’t love Kent at all, not really. Not like Seattle itself. The girls her age here were meaner and harder. They teased her. But she hadn’t talked about that to Lou, and she wasn’t going to start now. “What are you going to do?” she whispered.