by Lydia Millet
“Me, too,” Jax said.
But Hayley wouldn’t look at either of them, just gave an angry toss of her head and went back to her texting.
Mrs. M brought their dad up to speed on the official version of events from the passenger seat in the Subaru. Heading home from the ferry dock in Provincetown, Cara, Jax, and Jaye sat in the backseat and Hayley curled up with their bags in what her mom called the “way-back,” self-isolating with her phone.
“I apologize for not calling you right when this happened, William,” said Mrs. M. “But just a few minutes after I realized Cara was gone, when I was still brainstorming what to do, the nice lady at the Advancement Institute called. She’d gotten my number from Cara, and she told me the kids were doing fine, with details right down to what Cara was going to be having for dinner. She was very reassuring. So I decided not to bother you.”
“All’s well that ends well, I guess,” said Cara’s dad. “But Jackson, you should have let me know you were homesick. I would have driven in and picked you up myself.”
“I just got scared, all of a sudden,” said Jax. “And Cara was near. That’s all.”
“Of course, William, I’m sure you’ll want to have a serious talk with Cara about what happened here,” said Mrs. M. “The risk she took. I did express my deep disappointment at her irresponsible behavior, both as her chaperone and as a family friend. It goes without saying she should have contacted you about Jackson and stayed where she belonged. I shudder to think what could have happened there. But the discipline is your area.”
“I certainly will have a talk with her,” said Cara’s dad, and caught Cara’s eyes in the rearview mirror, glowering. “I certainly will.”
All things considered, though, the talk wasn’t too harsh. Cara’s dad had never been too comfortable punishing the kids; the worst thing he ever did was give them extra chores or, if he was feeling like he really had to make a show of it, saying they couldn’t watch TV. In this case, he opted for telling Cara she had to help Lolly keep the house cleaner—and, of course, that if something like this ever happened again, etc.
He cleared his throat awkwardly at the end of that speech, then patted her on the shoulder and retired to his office to do more writing about the back-whipping guys.
Cara grabbed a couple of slices of cinnamon-swirl bread from a bag on the kitchen counter—she was ravenous—and then took the stairs two at a time up to Jax’s room, tearing off generous bites of the soft bread as she went. It was just the two of them and their dad in the house at the moment; Lolly didn’t come over till just before dinnertime on weekdays. Since it was afternoon, Max was still in classes, although the school day would end soon.
On Jax’s door Messy-Hair Einstein hung droopily, attached by a single piece of tape. She reached up and restuck the other piece of tape on top of the poster with a fingertip, then knocked as she turned the knob.
For a second, stepping into Jax’s domain, she missed the days when she’d had to watch out for slugs and crabs crawling around. Now there were elaborate Lego machines underfoot, plus stray bright-colored blocks whose corners were surprisingly sharp when you stepped on them.
Jax was kneeling on his rug, halfway under his desk, setting up his backup computer—a.k.a. her computer—by plugging various cables into a power strip on the floor. His own laptop, of course, had been abandoned in his room at the Institute, along with his phone.
When they got the windowleaf back from Jaye—Cara had forgotten to ask for it when they dropped Jaye off—they could maybe get his tech back faster that way, she thought.
“What did Dad say?” he asked from beneath the desk, his voice muffled.
Cara sat down on the edge of his bed, though a chair would have been better. Among the messed-up covers were books, a greasy plate, a stray fork, and what appeared to be a large horseshoe magnet (which the tines of the dirty fork stuck to). She picked up the magnet/fork combo and placed it gingerly on a shelf.
“Extra chores,” she reported. “Other than that, he let me off with a warning.”
Jax scooted out from under the desk and straightened, dust bunnies hanging from the knees of his jeans; he hit a key on the laptop to boot it up, then sat down hard on his swiveling desk stool, which made a quick wheeze.
Suddenly he froze, then blinked and shook his head, as if to clear cobwebs.
“They have this place warded,” he said abruptly. “The whole block, down to the water. I just got it. Just now. The opposite of sensing danger. A kind of security fence, you know? I can feel the lines of it, the way you’d see laser beams crossing each other in a movie about a museum robbery. Warded, like with the charm we did in August, to make the house safe for Mom to come back?”
“There were wards at the power plant, too—where we found Mom. So now you’re sensing them?”
“I learned a lot down in the Rift Valley.”
“Did you see the animals, too—the glowing deep-sea animals? And was there lava where you were?”
Jax nodded. “And then there was the infrastructure of the Cold.”
“The pipes?”
“He pumps the gas from deep down, I think. I mean I don’t know the mechanics of the process. I didn’t even know there were major reservoirs of CO2 in the mantle before this. I thought it was just shifting rock and sometimes some magma or whatever. Geology’s not my best field. But I guess there must be. Because he definitely brings it up from somewhere. And he delivers it through the pipes.”
“Did you also see the machine? The machine scraping the bottom?”
Jax looked surprised.
“No.”
“It was some kind of huge vehicle. It scraped the bottom of the sea. I think it must have killed everything in its path. But that was all I could see; it passed me, and it was chasing all these animals in front of it. And then it was gone.”
“It must be a part of his—what does he call it? His ‘Cleaning Initiative.’ One of the three prongs.”
“Prongs? How did you learn all this?”
“I did get readings off some of the animals in the Valley, but the readings were hard to understand—our brains are too different. Well, they mostly don’t have brains is the thing; they have these spread-out nervous systems…star-fish, for instance. Sponges don’t have centralized brains or nervous systems. Sponges aren’t rocket scientists.”
“No kidding.”
“I could read the sea turtle last summer, remember? It had this deep intelligence. But sponges? Forget it.”
“So where’d you—”
“Mom. When she pulled me back it was sort of—through her mind. And I picked up all this data, just lying around in there.”
He grinned his little-boy grin.
Cara gaped at him, then realized she looked idiotic and shut her mouth.
“So the main prong is global warming, which he calls Atmosphere Adjustment. He likes these official-sounding names. Then there’s what scientists call ocean acidification, which he calls Marine Modification. The third prong is the Cleaning part. He wants to get rid of a long list of life forms, like most of them, to make room for his favorites. A few he’s going to help survive to be resources in the new world. Like, in the oceans I think he likes jellyfish. Actually that’s a misnomer, they’re not true fish at all. Some of them are allied with him, and algae, I think, but I can’t keep them straight, the algaes and plankton, some are with us and some with him. Technically even jellies are plankton, a kind of megaplankton also called gelatinous zooplankton, but then you also have your macroplankton—ctenophores, salps, doliolids, and pyrosomes—”
“Jax! Down, boy!”
“But coral reefs? Forget it. Reefs are his enemies. They’re all on our side, all of them. Every single reef species. Not only the corals but all the colorful reef fish like you see in aquariums—they’re already dying off around the world because of carbon. And cetaceans. We have all the dolphins, all the whales…and the mollusks. Every shell-forming organism in the ocean is on our side.”
“And you got this from Mom’s brain?”
“Well, her mind. It’s not equivalent to her brain. But close enough.”
“Um.”
“And on land it’s mostly the weedy species that are with him—things that survive in garbage dumps. Although there was a suggestion that the ants could be his. Like, all of them. If that’s true, it’d be bad. Because ants? There are a lot. Some scientists think they may make up a quarter of the total biomass of all land animals.”
He got up from his chair and pulled open his window; a rush of cold air made Cara shudder.
“What’d you do that for? You’re letting the heat out!”
“Shouldn’t we want to stay cool, anyway? With all those Burners gunning for us?”
“But you said our block was warded.”
“Yeah. I’m kidding. Mostly.”
He leaned down and stared at a seam on the wooden window frame.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Looking for them. The ants. I just remembered that all summer, whenever I opened this, there was this line of red ants along the window sill. Right here.”
He pointed, then shrugged.
“Of course, they’re all gone now. Anyway. It’s not like they would do anything, individually. They’re still ants. But if you got enough of them…”
“So—wait,” said Cara, and he pushed the window down again. “When Mom gave us that message for Dad, was that what she was talking about? The animals aren’t what they seem. She told me it was a line they both knew; she said it was mostly meant to let Dad know we’d really been in touch with her. Like, proof. But if the line about that—that some animals are on the other side, though most of them are with us—does that mean Dad does know about some of this? About the Carbon War?”
“I can read him, if you want. We’d just have to figure out the right question to ask.”
The conversation she’d had with her mother while they traveled to the nether space—about how the Cold was an alien, how he and his allies were responsible for global warming—had faded in her memory, as though a gauzy film had been thrown over the parts that weren’t the most dramatic. She struggled to bring back the details. About the animals, what had her mother said, exactly? She’d said the sea turtle was really a sea turtle, but the flying beast that seemed like an extinct Quetzalcoatlus wasn’t actually one….
“She did say there are animals and shapeshifters on our side,” she said. “And that the flying dinosaur thing is one of the shapeshifters. It’s a she, I guess, and they call her Q.”
“Not flying dinosaur,” corrected Jax. “Just pterosaur. Azhdarchidae: advanced, toothless—”
“But my point is, she isn’t that,” broke in Cara. “Mom said that shapeshifters—like her—well, some of them can take ancient forms. That’s what Q does. Mom can only take the forms of things that exist now, I guess. So she was the sea otter. And when they threw her into the basin beneath the cooling tower, she turned into a fish.”
“So there are human shapeshifters and ones that aren’t human, I guess,” said Jax. “I mean, in their first forms.”
Her mother had said that, too: “first form.” If I were in my first form….
“But, um,” said Cara, “Mom’s first form is human. Right?”
“I think so,” said Jax. “But…”
“But what?”
“Well, it’s obvious. But if she’s human, then some humans are shapeshifters, which implies…”
He trailed off again.
“What, Jax?”
“That human doesn’t really mean what everyone thinks it does.”
A few minutes later, both of them still hungry from missing breakfast and lunch and hardly sleeping the night before, they went down to the kitchen to forage. Cara stuck her head in their father’s study door to say hi, then closed the door when she withdrew. She and Jax were standing in the kitchen eating the rest of the cinnamon-swirl loaf, slathered with butter, when Max’s voice rang out behind them.
“Homes!”
They turned and looked down the front hallway as their older brother dropped his backpack on the floor and plucked his earphones out of his ears.
“Good to have you back, small man. Cara. So what’s the 411 on Zee? You find out anything more for me?”
Jax glanced at Cara.
“Long story,” she said.
Ten
They told Max everything—ending with Cara thinking she saw Zee. The three of them crowded into Jax’s room, scarfing pretzels and talking fast.
“I can’t believe this,” said Max, crumpling the bag and lobbing it into the already-full trashcan beside Jax’s desk. (It bounced off and hit the floor.) “It can’t be her. I can’t believe someone actually messed her up in this. I didn’t even tell her about the summer. I didn’t want to freak her out. Are you sure? You could have imagined it. Right? Easily”.
“I know,” said Cara. “I could have. But shouldn’t we find out for sure?”
“You’re saying you can take this book—this book that lets you go wherever you want to—and use it to find Zee? Just by thinking of her?”
“Well,” said Cara. “I hope so. I don’t know for sure. When we used it before, I had to have Jaye and Hayley to make it work. Because they’re both…so close to me, I guess. You can’t use the windowleaf alone; you need your friends for it to work right. A circle of them. Now Hayley’s mad at me. But if you and Jax take her place—maybe.”
“And if we do find her, Jax plans to do some ESP thing to get her head on straight again? If she is messed up by these… Cold Ones?”
“There’s only one Cold One,” corrected Jax.
“I guess so. Basically,” nodded Cara.
“But that would be just a big experiment, with Zee as the guinea pig! Jax, you admitted you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. It’d be a total shot in the dark!”
“But Max,” said Jax, “if she is a hollow, and the other option is leaving her that way…you don’t want that for her. I promise.”
“Listen. If we do find her, and there’s something messed up about her eyes—which, by the way, I’m not saying I believe there’s gonna be—then no offense, kid, but I’d want to call Mom in on that. I’d want to leave it up to the professionals.”
Jax looked downcast. The confidence he’d shown just instants before Max got home seemed to shrink, which made him seem younger.
“Easier said than done,” said Cara. “Calling in Mom, I mean.”
“I tell you what,” said Max. “Cara, if you get that book back from Jaye, then I’ll go along with you. We’ll leave Jax here, since he’s a target. Inside the so-called wards. He’ll be safe, right? And you and I can take our chances and see if that window thing can bring us to Zee. Because other than these stories you guys are telling me, I got nothing. And, yeah, she cuts class sometimes, but when she does it’s usually with me. So this is weird. But if we find her, and if there is something seriously wrong, like, physically, all I’m saying, I’m not going to rely on a little dude to fix it.”
“Jax’s instincts are better than you give him credit for,” said Cara, defensive. “Better than mine, anyway. Or yours.”
“Except only yesterday he was taken over by aliens and had to be locked up in some kind of futuristic pod deal, am I right? So he doesn’t exactly keep himself safe 24-7. Does he.”
“That was my fault,” said Cara. “I handed him the poison pen. Or whatever you want to call it.”
Jax shook his head.
“Max is right,” he mumbled, and picked pieces off a Lego crane, not meeting her eyes. “It was my fault. I was distracted, and I messed up.”
“Listen,” said Max, and elbowed Jax softly. “I didn’t mean to run you down. But you’re ten years old, Jax. Even if my whole brain would fit in your frontal lobe. And if Zee’s—if something’s happened to her…I mean this summer, I screwed up. I got the car totaled because I wasn’t taking stuff seriously, and I left you guys on your own.
I still feel guilty. I don’t want to make a mistake like that again.”
They sat there in a silence that wasn’t so bad. It was comforting to hear Max say he felt—well, anything.
An hour later Jaye’s mother stopped the car outside the Sykes’s house on their way to Jaye’s play rehearsal. Jaye had told her the windowleaf was an atlas from the school library that Cara needed for homework, so Mrs. Galt talked away on her headset, paying no attention to the girls as she idled in front of the lawn and Jaye and Cara met halfway up the walkway, Jaye clutching the book.
It was chilly in the fall sunset. A sharp wind had sprung up, moving the mostly bare limbs of the trees and sending dry leaves skittering here and there over the street, scratching papery sounds on the pavement. The girls stood shivering, neither of them wearing a coat. Cara remembered how hot it had been when she was raking leaves over the weekend; suddenly she wondered if that heat wave had had anything to do with the Burners.
They carry microclimates with them, Mrs. Omotoso had said.
Or maybe it was just global warming. Them but not them.
“So what are you going to do with it?” asked Jaye.
When Cara called to ask Jaye to bring the book, her dad had come into the room, so she hadn’t been able to explain.
“We’re going to try to find Zee,” she said now. “And bring her back.”
Jaye froze for a second. Then she turned and ran back down to her mother’s waiting car. She tapped on the window and then leaned in when her mother rolled it down; after a short discussion, the car was pulling away again.
“Where’s she going?” asked Cara when Jaye came back. “What about—don’t you have to go to your play practice?”
“She’ll pick me up later. I told her we had a big test tomorrow that I’d spaced on. I said you and I needed to cram for it together.”
“You’re missing rehearsal?”
“You need your friends to make that book work, don’t you? So I’m coming.”
“Are you sure?” asked Cara. “Last night, because of what I got you into, some man practically strangled you. Last night! Are you really OK with going through again?”
