All the Pretty Little Horses

by Mira Grant

  “Would the parents be willing to pay it?” asked Stacy.

  Edie sighed. “Honestly, I think most of them already have. If you’ve been separated from your children, under circumstances like these, you’re not going to think that they’re still out there waiting for you. We’ve found at least three people who, when offered the chance to be reunited with their children, replied ‘my child is dead’ and shut the door. People are moving on. People are trying to put the Rising behind them. They want it not to have happened. Part of that is burying the dead. Part of that is letting what’s gone stay gone.”

  Michael glanced at Stacy, afraid of what he might see reflected in her face. His breath caught in his throat, choking and collaring him.

  All he saw in her eyes was longing.

  Edie’s smile was as sudden as a winter sunrise, and twice as filled with shadows. “Our kids are happy, healthy, and have no strings attached. The choice to rescind the rights of any surviving parents was made as much for the protection of the children as anyone else. We’re not going to have a bunch of people come sashaying in saying ‘right, thanks for dealing with the nightmares and the trauma and the therapy bills and the malnutrition and the neglect, we’ll have our kids back now, and if you try to say no, we’ll sue.’ These kids need stability. They need to know that the people they go to sleep loving will still be there when they wake up in the morning. If that means ‘finders keepers, losers weepers’ is suddenly a phrase that can be applied to children, well. I’ll be more than happy to let that be my legacy. It’s better than any of the other options on the table.”

  Edie Song had survived the Rising, just like everyone else who still counted themselves among the living. She seemed friendly enough—amiable even, the sort of woman who couldn’t possibly have cut her way out of a horde of the infected during the worst of the conflicts. Some people had been lucky: They had been able to make it to government safe houses or private compounds before things got bad, and had weathered the Rising in relative peace and safety. But there was something in the way she smiled that made Michael suspect that her story hadn’t been that straightforward, or that kind.

  “Can we see the children?” Stacy’s voice was soft, and filled with a plea that Michael couldn’t quite identify. Was she hoping for a yes, or for a no?

  This time, Edie’s smile had no shadows in it at all.

  4.

  The security separating the administrative office from the main orphanage was top-notch, as befitted a state-sponsored facility. Michael studied the blood test panels—state-of-the-art, fresh off the assembly lines in Silicon Valley, where the computer assembly rooms had found themselves quickly converted for medical equipment manufacture—and the men who stood near them, guns at the ready. It was all very impressive, there was no question about that.

  But there were questions that needed to be asked. Questions like “who will pay for the upgrades, when this is no longer the best we have to offer?” and “how long will these children stay in the public eye, rather than becoming one more thing we don’t want to talk about?” The human race had paid a great deal to survive through the dark days of the Rising. A few children wouldn’t be that much more to lose.

  We can’t let that happen, he thought, as he pressed his hand against a flat-screen panel, and felt the needle bite into his palm. Whatever it takes, we can’t let that happen.

  The light flashed green, and the final door unlocked. Together, the three of them stepped into what had once been a telephone company’s regional office, and was now the home of over four hundred wards of the state of California.

  The walls had been painted a cheery shade of green, shading to blue toward the tops. The floor—originally industrial tile, if the rest of the architecture was an accurate gauge—was covered in a cheery yellow carpet. It was surprisingly pristine. Edie saw Michael squinting at it, and grinned.

  “Stain-resistant, water-resistant, even flame-resistant. You could set this carpet on fire and it would blow itself out in a matter of seconds. It was judged too expensive for the post-Rising home owner, and so the company that makes it donated it to us as a sort of ‘here you go, please give us some good publicity’ move,” she said.

  “I want some,” said Stacy.

  “I can give you their card.” Edie continued across the lobby, heading for the elevators. As she walked, she gestured to the overstuffed couches and armchairs that filled the right half of the echoing room. “This is our visiting section. When people have come to consider a specific child for fosterage or adoption, but aren’t quite ready to commit, we set up the meetings here.”

  “Supervision?” ventured Stacy.

  Edie sobered. “Controlling their hopes. The children, I mean, not the prospective parents. These are kids who’ve already seen more than their fair share. They’ve lost their birth families. Some of them had to put down parents or older siblings during the bad days. We have children who have no interest in being adopted, ever, because this is the first stable home they’ve had since the dead began to walk. We have others who want out of here desperately, because they can’t even pretend that the world is back to normal until they have beds and houses of their own. This place isn’t perfect—not by a long shot. We have problems with the older children picking on the younger ones when no one’s looking, and with behavioral issues that could be handled just fine one on one, but which become difficult to treat and manage in an institutional setting. And then we have the adults who stroll in here, and say they want to see the kids, but what they really want is to reassure themselves that they’re making the right choice by not being in charge of another living thing.”

  They had reached the elevators. Edie pressed the call button with a quick, vicious jab of her finger. The motion was so angry, so filled with futile rage, that it said more about the situation than any number of pre-rehearsed speeches. Michael glanced to Stacy, who nodded quickly. She’d been filming. She was still filming.

  “I saw your reports on the situation in Santa Cruz,” said Edie, more quietly, like she was rethinking the wisdom of her words even as she spoke them. “That was some good work. We’ve had three successful adoptions that we can trace back to your site. Everyone calls these kids ‘orphans of the Rising’ now. Having a label like that to hang on them…it’s helping. It humanizes them, and that can make all the difference in the world. That’s part of why you have the access you do. I just have one request.”

  “What’s that?” asked Stacy.

  “Don’t toy with them. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Don’t pretend that you’re considering an adoption if you’re not. These are children. They need homes. They need families. They need to wake up every morning knowing that the people around them will still be there when the sun goes down.” Edie shook her head at the stunned expressions that both their faces now wore. “I have eyes. I saw the way you looked at the kids on that video, and I know about your backgrounds. Did you really think I wouldn’t have pulled your records before I allowed you to come here? Hell, your Wikipedia pages mention that you lost a child during the Rising. I can understand why you’d consider opening your home to a new one. I can also understand why you would decide that you couldn’t stand it. All I am asking is that you not make any promises that you’re not intending to keep. Can you do that for me? Can you do that for the kids?”

  “I can,” said Stacy.

  Edie looked to Michael. He nodded. She smiled.

  “Good,” she said. The elevator doors swung open behind her, and she gestured for them both to step inside, already talking again, already back in her comfortable administrator’s voice. “The elevator is state-of-the-art, with an optional blood testing panel in the wall. Adults who show any signs of disorientation or discomfort can be required to confirm their infection status before they’re allowed to disembark. A staff member is always present when the elevators are in use, which helps. Anyone who does not follow staff instructions regarding blood tests and health concerns will be immediately remov
ed from the premises.”

  “What about children large enough to amplify?” asked Michael. “Are they subject to the same restrictions?”

  “Children of amplification weight and above have separate living quarters, and are encouraged to submit to voluntary blood tests multiple times per day,” said Edie. “Many of them are on the ‘do not seek adoption’ list—they’re close enough to adulthood that this is more of a way station than a permanent stop. We’re focusing our permanent placement efforts on children ages eight and below.”

  Michael, who knew how difficult it had been to find homes for teenagers before the Rising, said nothing. Whatever sacrifices were being made, they had already been considered, at length, by people with more information than he had available to him. He could research the subject of teen adoptions post-Kellis-Amberlee when he was safe at home, and no longer needed to worry about ruining the narrative line of Stacy’s video.

  “Will we meet any of the older children?” asked Stacy.

  “Only if they agree to see you,” said Edie. “Because most of them have removed themselves from consideration for placement, they’re no longer required to speak with adults who are not employees of the orphanage, from the government, or involved with their academic assessments. The state has granted free admission to the UC system for all of our older kids. They’ll have a chance to make a life for themselves. Some of them will probably do better than the adults who are meant to be taking care of them. They won’t have as much to mourn.”

  “No one came through the Rising unscathed,” said Stacy.

  The elevator beeped as they reached their destination. Edie shot her a sympathetic look before stepping through the slowly opening doors. “No. No one did.”

  If the lobby had been changed, the upper floors—once the purview of cubicle farms and endless meetings in glass-walled rooms—had been totally transformed. Some of the cube walls were still there, reconfigured into cubbies and private rooms along the far wall, but most were gone, replaced by tables, beanbag chairs, and freestanding shelves heavy with books and toys. Many of them looked secondhand, but that actually added to the homey atmosphere the space was trying so hard to project. “You can be safe here,” said the space, and “you can be at home here,” said the space, and most of all, “you can stay here for as long as you need to.” Whether this was home or just a stopping point, it was safe and clean and familiar. It would do.

  Four hundred children had seemed like a great number, disclosed in a glass-walled office barely big enough to hold three adults without becoming cramped. In this vast, open office, it became negligible. When all the other floors in use by the orphanage were factored in, it was suddenly understandable that Michael could count no more than forty children as he looked around the room. They were seated on beanbags or on the floor; they were standing frozen next to bookshelves and toy boxes, their hands full of whatever prizes they had been moving to claim when the elevator doors slid open. His first, dizzying thought was that all the children who had survived the Rising had somehow done it by transforming themselves into wild deer. They still looked human, but they were completely motionless, barely even breathing as they stared at the predators in their midst.

  Then Edie stepped forward, and smiled—a new smile, a reassuring smile, the kind that a shepherd might use to reassure the flock—before she said, “Everyone, I’d like you to meet Stacy and Michael Mason. They’re the ones who took all those recordings in Santa Cruz, and helped the children from the butterfly shack. They’d like to talk to you about what it’s like here.”

  The words “Santa Cruz” seemed to break whatever spell the children had cast upon themselves. They were suddenly in motion, half swarming toward the adults while the other half hung back, creeping close enough to listen without coming near enough to put themselves in danger.

  “—went to Santa Cruz? Mandy said those videos were faked—”

  “—went to the Boardwalk with my parents when I was eight, I ate six hot dogs—”

  “—you see any banana slugs? They’re super yellow, I think they’re really cool—”

  “Did you see my mommy?”

  The question scythed through all the noise around it, startling the other children into silence. One by one, they stepped aside, until a little girl of no more than five was looking calmly and clearly at the Masons.

  She was only a baby when this started; she probably doesn’t remember a world before the Rising, thought Stacy, her stomach giving a sickening lurch as the implications struck home.

  Oh dear God, thought Michael.

  Stacy recovered first. She knelt down a little, putting herself closer to the girl’s eye level, and said, “I’m sorry, honey. We didn’t see any adults while we were there.” Not uninfected ones, anyway. All the adults in Santa Cruz had long since fallen prey to Kellis-Amberlee, and would not be kissing any boo-boos or making any beds. Never again.

  The little girl looked at Stacy solemnly. “Did you look?”

  “We did look, yes. We looked in as many places as we could, and the soldiers who were there with us looked in even more. We didn’t find your mommy. I’m sorry.”

  The little girl nodded. “Okay. Thank you for looking.”

  Edie’s hand fell on Stacy’s shoulder like a great weight. Stacy looked up. Edie was stone-faced, more statue than woman. “I promise, Chrissy, you’ll know as soon as we know anything about your mommy. But you promised me to stop asking our guests, remember?”

  “I remember,” said Chrissy, without a trace of shame. “You didn’t say the promise would mean people who’d been to Santa Cruz. That’s where my mommy was when she stopped answering her phone. You didn’t say, and so I didn’t know.”

  “You know now,” said Edie.

  “I do,” agreed Chrissy.

  Stacy stood. “I don’t mind,” she said.

  “That’s very kind of you,” replied Edie. She looked at the children, and then back to the Masons. “This is our midrange group. None of them have reached amplification weight as yet, and they’re all old enough to manage with minimal supervision when not in class. We have six teachers visiting the center, and we’re hoping to add four more, just to keep class and study group sizes down. Most of our children are reading at or above their age level. The next floor up is for our older children, and above them, you’ll find our youngest residents. Most of them are under the age of two, although we have a few three year olds who have yet to be socialized into the wider population.”

  It was efficient; it was effective; for all the warmth and comfort that Edie and her staff were so clearly struggling to provide, it felt disturbingly industrial to Michael. “We’d like to see the whole facility,” he said.

  Edie smiled. “Right this way.”

  5.

  The orphanage complex in Sacramento was built inside a refurbished arcade-style strip mall, with gates and razor wire blocking the entrances. It was a necessary adaptation to such an open-air facility, but it still lent the entire place an air of military grimness that struck Michael as excessive and Stacy as aesthetically distasteful. The children there were kept in the same three age groups as the children in Dublin. The oldest children were already looking into military service as a way to practical experience, medical school, and eventual enrollment with the CDC. The youngest children cooed and waved their hands in the ways of babies since the beginning of time, unaware that they were the last sons and daughters of an old world, or that they would grow up to become part of something new.

  The administrator in Sacramento was a nervous-looking man named Roy who didn’t seem to enjoy the position, or being anywhere near the children, even the ones who were far too small to amplify. But he knew all the guards by name, and he could tell at a glance whether the throngs of orphans that waited around every corner were complete. If there was one child missing, he knew, and would go looking. He’d been given the job for a reason, and he did it well. That didn’t stop the Masons from walking away from Sacramento feeling like
it could use a hand from the team that was running Dublin—but then, they were such different facilities. Who could say whether the techniques that worked at one would work at the other?

  And then there was the reality of the situation to be considered. This was only the beginning: this was the shallow end of the curve. Most of the orphans of the Rising hadn’t been recovered yet, and many of the ones who had were undergoing medical treatment, or waiting for their parents to be verified as dead. There would be more orphanages before any of them were closed. Many, many more.

  Michael and Stacy sat in their living room, their laptops propped against their respective knees, looking at the footage she’d taken. Footage of children asking about the size of their houses and the number of guns they owned in the same sentence; footage of older children demonstrating the technique for field-stripping a rifle, sleeping with shotguns next to their beds like those were the talismans that would keep them from conversion. Michael was focusing on the interviews. Stacy was focusing on the accounts of their survival—or she was supposed to be, anyway.

  The footage on her screen, looping over and over again, showed a room full of toddlers and small babies, all of them sleeping under the soft naptime lights. Her fingers brushed a corner, touching the virtual hair of a little girl.

  Michael took off his headphones, and waited.

  He didn’t have to wait for long.

  “Yes,” said Stacy. Her voice was thick with tears, heavy with regret, cold with shadows: It was a voice issuing from the unmarked grave of the woman she had been, and it drew a line of fear down her husband’s spine. There were implications in that voice, dark, terrible implications, things that would never stand the light of day.

  He knew, even before he spoke, that this was his once chance to stop what he had put into motion. A hint of disapproval, and she would bury that poor, sad woman again, this time forever. She would learn how to be the new Stacy, and she would do it without wearing her ghosts around her shoulders.