by Malinda Lo
Reese took it off and handed it over. Amber walked to the door, edging carefully around the fragments of glass that had fallen outside, and wrapped the remains of the jacket over her hand to knock a few more shards out of the window. Then she gingerly reached inside and unlocked the door, pushing it open. “Voilà,” she said.
“We scare you?” Reese said.
Amber shook out the ruined jacket and held it out to Reese. “I never said it was a bad thing.”
The house was clearly a bachelor’s residence. The back door opened into a mudroom that was empty except for an extra pair of work boots and a puffy winter coat. They passed a bathroom with a sink strewn with men’s shaving equipment, and a bedroom with an unmade bed and a dresser with several drawers hanging open. They proceeded into the kitchen, which had the remains of someone’s breakfast sitting on the counter: a cereal bowl with an inch of milk in the bottom next to a box of Frosted Flakes. There was a stack of mail on the round kitchen table in the corner. Reese laid Carter’s gun on the table and shuffled through the envelopes. “Hey, we’re in Ohio,” she said. “The guy who lives here is named Carl Baldwin.” A cordless phone was lying nearby, and David set the agent’s gun down to pick up the phone.
“Wait a second,” Reese said. “Who are you calling? Don’t you think our parents’ lines will be tapped by now? The Blue Base people have to be looking for us.”
Amber held out her hand. “Let me call Malcolm Todd.”
“Agent Todd?” Reese said in surprise. “Where is he?”
“He’s not really an agent, and he had to go undercover. He leaked the video, you know. The one of me getting shot. So after that he couldn’t exactly go back to work for your government.”
“Really?” David said. “So he’s been hiding out ever since then?”
“Sort of. He’s been waiting for the call to go back home, but the ship hasn’t been able to leave Earth yet. So he went underground.”
“Is he near here?” Reese asked.
“I don’t know where he is, but he can contact the ship securely, and they can get here. Give me one of those envelopes with the address on it.”
Reese handed her an electric bill, and David gave her the phone. Amber dialed a number from memory. It rang for what seemed like a long time, but finally she said, “Hello?” After a brief pause, she began to speak into the phone in Imrian. Reese had never heard more than a few words in the language, and hearing Amber speak it was startling. Even though she knew Amber was Imrian, Reese had always thought of her as being American. Of course, Reese realized, she wasn’t. Amber’s whole body language changed when she spoke Imrian; she seemed to stand up straighter, and the tone of her voice lowered. The language sounded liquid, with multiple syllables rolled together in soft Rs and breathy Hs. After a few minutes of conversation Amber read out the address on the electric bill, and then concluded the call.
“What did he say?” Reese asked.
Amber put the phone down. “They’re coming. He said to be ready in a few hours and to wait outside.”
“Did he say anything about our parents?” David asked.
“They’re okay. He’s been in touch with the ship since we were taken, and they’re all safe.” Amber rubbed a hand over her eyes. “I need to use the bathroom to wash off my feet and stuff. Do you guys need it first? I might be a while.”
David glanced at Reese. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll wait.”
“Thanks,” Reese said. “I’ll be quick.”
The bathroom was about a thousand times cleaner than the one in the farmhouse where they had been held prisoner. As Reese washed up in the sink, the water ran brown down the drain. She felt filthy all over. Dirt from the basement was crusted over her previously white shirt, and dirt from the field was smeared all over her pants. She found rusty spatters of dried liquid on her knuckles, and she scraped at them with damp fingernails, hoping it wasn’t Carter’s blood from when she had shot him.
She thought she was going to be sick.
She moved to the toilet, flipping up the seat, and gasped raggedly as she bent over. Droplets of water plummeted from her chin into the toilet bowl. I shot a man, she thought. Last night it had happened so fast she hadn’t had time to think. She had no love for Carter, but she hadn’t wanted to kill him either. What would happen to her if he was dead? Would she be tried for murder? The thoughts made her head spin. She remembered the agent saying he could make sure she wasn’t prosecuted for what she had done. David had smashed his head in with a rock.
“Oh God,” she muttered.
She had to kneel on the floor. Her hands gripped the edge of the toilet bowl and she tried to breathe regularly. One thing at a time, she told herself. First things first: get out of Carl Baldwin’s house.
When her stomach stopped lurching, she got up. Her hands shook as she finger-combed her hair away from her face. It didn’t look good, but it helped a little. She looked less like an escaped lunatic, and more like the average juvenile delinquent who had gone running in dress clothes across a field in the middle of the night. She sighed, dried her hands on Carl Baldwin’s towel, and went back to the kitchen.
David and Amber were looking at each other with extremely weird expressions on their faces. They spun around when she returned, and she realized she had been gone for a while. “What’s going on?” she asked warily.
“I have to pee,” David said, brushing past her.
Amber went to the refrigerator and opened the door, peering inside. “I’m starving.”
Reese followed her. “Amber.”
“Hey look, Carl’s got some mac-and-cheese leftovers. Do you think he’d care if we ate them?” Amber held up a casserole dish half full of macaroni and cheese.
“What were you guys talking about?” Reese asked.
Amber didn’t look at her. “It’s between me and David, okay? Do you want some mac and cheese?” She put the casserole in the microwave and searched the drawers until she found forks. She laid them on the counter and began to open the cabinets. She took down two glasses and filled them with water from the tap. “Here,” she said, putting one on the counter in front of Reese. “You must be thirsty.”
Reese took it, studying Amber’s suspiciously calm face. Reese drank the water. When the microwave dinged, Amber took the casserole out and set it on the counter between them, then forked up a mouthful. Her eyes closed when she tasted her first bite.
“Oh my God, Carl Baldwin is a great cook,” Amber said, quickly taking another bite.
“Really?” Reese put down her water glass and tried the macaroni and cheese. It was salty and creamy, and she tasted the unmistakable tang of blue cheese. “Wow.” Reese took a bigger bite.
By the time David returned a few minutes later, they had eaten almost all of it. “I’m sorry,” Amber said apologetically. “Look, there’s still a little left.” She grabbed another fork and gave it to him.
“Thanks,” David said dryly.
Amber flashed him a brief smile, which made Reese’s suspicion return. What had happened between them when she was in the bathroom?
“I’m gonna go wash up,” Amber said, avoiding Reese’s questioning gaze. She put down her fork and hightailed it out of the kitchen.
David was opening the cabinets, and Reese asked, “What are you looking for?”
“Water glasses?”
She pointed to the cabinet to the left of the stove. As he filled a glass at the sink she said, “You should eat the rest of the mac and cheese. I think there’s bread and stuff too if you want a sandwich.” She noticed that he had washed the blood off his face and hand, but some still remained beneath his chin. She pulled a paper towel off the roll and dampened it beneath the faucet. “You missed a spot,” she said, and dabbed at the dried blood on his neck. The towel came away red. She stepped back. His tie was crooked, and now the collar of his shirt was wet as well as stained. “You kind of look like a refugee from a postapocalyptic debate tournament,” she said, smiling.
He laughed. “I think we lost.”
She shook her head. “They haven’t finished judging yet.”
He reached for her hand, pulling the stained paper towel out of her grasp before he linked his fingers with hers. “We have to talk.”
She stiffened. “About what?”
“Amber talked to me.”
Reese’s stomach dropped. “Oh God.”
He almost smiled. “Reese—”
“I told her it wouldn’t work,” she said. He wouldn’t let go of her hand, and she knew he was feeling everything she was: the sharp acceleration of her heart; the fear that he would be insulted; the mortification that Amber had been the one to broach the subject of the three of them.
“I know,” he said.
“I don’t want to put you through that. It’s not fair. Amber’s not thinking clearly. I mean, we’re not Imrians, we’re—” She stopped. He wasn’t insulted or angry. In fact, she sensed something else entirely, but it confused her.
“What are we?” he asked softly.
The tips of David’s black hair were wet from the bathroom sink. His brown eyes were focused intently on her, and she could sense all of him through the touch of his fingers: whole, separate, his consciousness an entire world apart from hers.
Before the adaptation, she had never known the way someone else felt—not truly. She could guess. She was usually bad at that, or at least she thought she was. She had a hard enough time figuring out what she was feeling herself, and now, standing in Carl Baldwin’s kitchen in the middle of Ohio, she realized that was why she had been so scared of getting involved with anyone. It wasn’t about being afraid of being hurt. It was about being afraid of the inchoate heart of herself. If she wasn’t sure of herself—if she couldn’t predict how she was going to feel from one moment to the next—how could she be in a relationship with anyone else?
That night in Phoenix last June, when David walked her back to her room and almost kissed her, her emotions had risen up in an unexpected tidal wave of fear and self-doubt, and she had had no idea what to do about them except shove them—and him—away. She wasn’t going to do that again. Now she was different. Now she knew what David was feeling, and by opening up to his consciousness, she saw the way he saw her. He didn’t think she was a tangled mess of conflicting emotions to be avoided at all costs. He thought she was complicated and beautiful and stubborn, and he loved it all, and she whispered, “I don’t know what we are, but I know I love you.”
She slid her arms around him and nestled her face in the hollow between his neck and shoulder and took a long, shuddering breath. He squeezed her tighter and said, “I love you too.”
She smiled, hiding it against his shoulder, but she knew he couldn’t mistake the warmth that flared in her. She wanted to stand there forever, feeling the steady rhythm of his heart next to hers.
It was much too soon when he said gently, “We do need to talk about that other thing.”
She disentangled herself from him and he backed away, putting a couple of feet between them. “Okay,” she said nervously.
He reached for his water glass and took a drink first. His cheeks were a little pink. “So, Amber suggested that, um, you could date both of us.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Let me just say this. I know you told her I wouldn’t go for it. She told me that too. And you were probably right. I was—” He hesitated, rubbing his hand through his hair so that it stood straight up. “I was really jealous before. I didn’t like her because I knew how much you liked her, and I couldn’t get past the fact that other people would see you with her and judge me for being—not enough, or something.” The pink spots on his cheeks darkened. “The day we broke up, you said that the way you felt about me should be more important than what other people thought. I couldn’t hear that then. I was too jealous. But now…” He looked at her, and it was obvious how difficult it was for him to say these things. She wanted to reach for him, to tell him he didn’t have to say another word, but as she stepped forward he shook his head.
“You were right,” he said. “The way you feel is way more important than how other people think about me and you. And I know how you feel about me. I know.”
“I know,” she said, the words thick in her throat.
He took a quick breath. “I know how you feel about me, and I know how you feel about her, and…” He hesitated. “I know how she feels about you, and I don’t want to be the reason you don’t get to feel that. But most of all, I don’t want to have to pretend that I don’t love you.”
Reese was astonished. “What are you saying?” she whispered. Every nerve in her body seemed to tremble.
He was backed up against the counter, arms crossed. “I’m saying we can try. If you want to date us both, we can try.”
She stared at his flushed face. She saw the tension in his shoulders. “Are you sure?”
He looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, I’m sure. Do you want to do that?”
“I don’t—I mean—maybe?” It was so hard for her to say yes. It still seemed like an impossibility. “I don’t know how it would work,” she said, waving her hands.
“We’d have to talk about that.”
She groaned. “Oh God, I hate talking.”
One corner of his mouth curved up. “I’d say we could not talk, but I think it would be better if we said these things out loud.”
She almost said Why? The word was on the tip of her tongue, but she bit it back. She knew the answer. Saying it out loud made it real in a way that susum’urda never would—not for her and David. They might be different now, but they had been born human, and they could never completely leave that identity behind. “Okay,” she said. All her disparate emotions seemed to coalesce. She knew what she wanted, and now that she had made the decision, the words came easily to her—as if they had always been there in the background, waiting. “We’ll talk about it. I want to be with you, and I want to be with her, and I want to try to make it work.” Her legs wobbled as she moved toward him and reached for his hands. “Now can I kiss you?”
She felt the imprint of his smile on her mouth as his hands moved around her waist, the connection opening up between the two of them as she pulled him closer: all of him tangled with all of her, and she wasn’t confused, not one tiny bit.
*
Amber wasn’t in the bathroom anymore. “Amber?” Reese called.
“I’m in here,” Amber said from the bedroom.
Reese went into Carl Baldwin’s bedroom and saw Amber picking through what appeared to be his sock drawer. “What are you doing?”
Amber pulled out a pair of white tube socks. “I can’t fit into any of his shoes, but I’m not walking around barefoot anymore.” She sat on the edge of the bed and unrolled the socks, giving them a dubious look. “I guess they’re clean enough.”
“You just ran through two dirty fields in bare feet and you’re worried about the cleanliness of these socks?” Reese said, laughing.
Amber arched an eyebrow at her. “You’re in a good mood.” She crossed her right ankle over her left knee and studied the sole of her foot. It was still red and scarred, but the skin no longer appeared to be broken. Amber slid the sock on. “Did you talk to David?”
Reese leaned against the dresser. “Yeah.”
Amber glanced up and then back down at her foot, a faint pink stain on her cheeks. “So?”
“When you first suggested this—last Friday on the ship—you said it wasn’t unusual for Imrians to be in relationships of more than two people.”
Amber seemed surprised that Reese was bringing this up. “Yeah, so?”
“Is it normal?”
Amber pulled on the second tube sock. They came all the way up over her knees, and she tugged the hem of her dress down so that it looked like she was wearing thick white tights. “It’s not uncommon. I have three parents.”
Reese’s jaw dropped. “You mean, Dr. Brand is in a—a—”
“I prefer to not think of my
mother too closely in this situation,” Amber said dryly. “But I do have two fathers. They’re back home.”
“Really?”
Amber smiled. “Really. I think you’d like them.”
Curiosity overcame Reese’s self-consciousness. “How does that work with, um, you said the Imria use an artificial womb? Is only one of them your biological father?”
“No, they’re both my biological fathers.” At Reese’s look of confusion, she elaborated. “You always need an egg to begin with, and then genes from all parents involved are added in during conception. It’s like genetic engineering, I guess.”
“So they picked who you would look like and everything?”
“Well, you can’t actually know that for sure, but… sort of. I guess I’d say that Imrian children are deliberately created.” Amber crossed her legs. “But let’s not get off track. You talked about it with David? What did you decide?”
Amber was trying to sound nonchalant, but Reese heard the anxiousness in her voice. Her dress was smudged with dirt and the right cap sleeve had a rip in it. She must have tried to wash off her face in the bathroom, but traces of eyeliner remained, and her hair was wet.
“You said that you liked me because I made you feel human,” Reese said, thinking back to that afternoon on the beach at Angel Island. “But humans… we don’t normally do this. We have a hard enough time being with one other person, much less two. I know there are people who can do it. But I’ve never thought I could be one of them. I never thought about it, period. It’s scary, you know?”
“What scares you the most?” Amber asked.
“I’m scared that we’re going to screw it up,” Reese said frankly. “That I’m going to hurt one of you, or that it’s just going to be too complicated. And if I start thinking about what might happen when other people—the public—find out, I might have a panic attack. I’ve never done anything remotely like this before. Before I met you, I didn’t think I’d ever want to date anyone.”
