[English] ICONS (Biểu Tượng)

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“No. I don’t. It’s not your fault that you can’t see things the way they are. Your mother is the Ambassador. But I don’t have a mother, and I don’t have that problem.”

Lucas’s face twists into anger. “Thanks for the forgiveness. You’re going to want to eat that apple now.” He motions down the hall, to the soldiers, and I feel my chest tightening as they move toward me.

“Why? What is it?” I automatically brace myself, as I have for years. The moment I wake up, I check to see what new, terrible thing has happened. What disaster. What calamity. I feel it in the minds of the people around me, before I put one foot on the floor.

“I came here to get you, Dol. The Ambassador has sent for you.”

Color rushes into my face, and I want to run for it. Flee. Swim, if I have to. Every cell in my body is screaming at me to move, but I know there’s no point. I don’t stand a chance.

“Now?”

“It was going to be just the guards. I told her you’d rather see me.” He slides his hand into my pocket, letting his fingers brush against mine. Then he shoves the apple into my hand. “I hope I wasn’t wrong.”

I shove the apple back at him, because he was. He is.

He’s wrong about everything.

“Lucas Amare.”

The whisper spreads like a quiet ripple as we enter the large outer bank of Embassy office space. I don’t see who started it. It doesn’t matter. There are probably twenty heads bowed over twenty desks, and it could have been any one of them.

I lean closer to Lucas. “Do they know?”

He raises an eyebrow. “That I’m my mother’s son?”

“No. The other thing.”

His eyes narrow and he shakes his head.

What about me? What do they know?

But I can’t bring myself to ask, and instead I focus on suppressing the urge to touch his hand, to unlock more of what he’s feeling. I need to not know what he’s feeling right now. I need to not know what anyone is feeling. I need to be strong, and coming into that kind of contact with people—especially in the kind of world we live in now—it’s too draining.

So I keep my hands to myself and nod back.

We follow the whispering, past a line of administrators and bureaucrats outside the Ambassador’s office. For the most part, they don’t look up at Lucas, though I know they see him; it’s the not-looking that gives them away. I only see them staring at us when I glance back over my shoulder.

There is no way not to feel them.

I can’t avoid the sharp jags of their anxiety and need. The way they want to please him, to know him. They’d follow him into a blazing pit of fire. That’s what makes Lucas so dangerous.

That’s why he’s an Icon Child who matters, I think to myself, in a way I never will. I feel things, sense what people are thinking, that’s all. I know what I feel, what others feel around me, but I can’t do anything about it. Lucas seems oblivious to all of it, to the riot he incites by being alive. I’m envious.

It isn’t just his mother who makes them all cower when he walks by. I’d fear him too, if I was one of them.

An outer door opens, then an inner one.

Our feet make no noise as we move across the rich, soft rug that lines the foyer of the Ambassador’s office. Her own door is not open.

Even her son knocks.

Through the glass, I see the Ambassador look up from her desk. Her hair is silver-white, like the pelt of some kind of lost species. Maybe a mink, though I have only seen one in a book. It’s her eyes that convince me, not her hair. Her eyes gleam like those of an animal caught in a trap, the moment before chewing off its own foot. Anything to escape. Anything *****rvive. It’s the kind of madness that isn’t mad at all. It’s only logical, given the circumstance. You’d be mad not to feel it. Like everyone in this office, I realize. Everyone we’ve passed.

I wonder if I have it, too. If I’m too mad to notice.

Lucas pushes open the door and I follow him inside.

“Darling. Thank you for coming. Both of you.” She nods at me and smiles at Lucas. I feel it in her, the surge he seems to cause in everyone who sees him. Except it’s different to her, because she created him. She possesses him. When she looks at him, she feels pleasure. It’s the same love she feels when she looks in the mirror.

If you can call that love.

I don’t remember my mother, not really. But I can’t imagine she felt the same way about me. I can’t imagine I was only a mirror to her, nothing more. I guess I’ll never know.

“Do you know why you’re here? Why I sent for you?” She looks to me, smoothing a stray strand of silver hair behind her ear. Her skin is flawless, not a wrinkle in sight. Her eyes, the animal eyes, are blue-gray, hard as steel. As set as the Tracks. “Why my own son came to get you, in fact, all the way from Mission La Purísima? Against what should have been his better judgment, and my wishes?” Her eyes flicker over to him and back.

“No, sir.” The color drains out of my face at the mention of my home and everything I have lost. “Ma’am.” She looks at me pointedly. I try again. “I mean, Madame Ambassador.”

“Please, sit.”

I feel myself jerking downward as if I were a dog on a leash.

Lucas is no better. He’s in his seat before I am. I try to look at the Ambassador, but it’s much harder now. The morning light is bright and blasts through the slatted blinds, sending blurry stripes across our faces, across the walls. As if the world outside was made of nothing but light. Even the ceiling lights are hot and white and flooding directly down on me. I sense that my chair is placed just so, for this express purpose, as if I am in some sort of interrogation chamber.

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I know I am.

“Doloria. Can I call you Dolly?”

I nod. It’s all I can manage. I try not to think about the fact that I am sitting there in a private meeting with the Ambassador, in army pants and combat boots. That she knows my nickname.

I try not to think that this woman could kill me with one wave of her hand.

“Have you ever been outside the Grass, Dolly?”

I shake my head before I remember to speak. “No. Madame Ambassador.”

She shifts in her chair, looking from me to Lucas again, slowly now. “Colonel Catallus? Can you de-Classify the footage, please?” She looks toward me, almost apologetically. “My Head of Security. It requires two Classified Embassy clearance codes to activate use of unauthorized feeds. Protocol.”

A man steps out of the shadows, where he has been standing behind the Ambassador’s desk, half hidden in the shadow of a potted palm. It is the Brass Wings Man, I realize. He is wearing a military suit that looks oddly religious. I think once again of the Padre, my Padre.

I look away.

The Ambassador watches as the vid-screen behind her desk flickers online. “I’m not sure you understand what it’s like, Doloria, to serve two masters. I do it myself, every day.” She turns her back to me, staring at the images on the screen. A gray cityscape rolls past the camera.

“The House of Lords relies on me to keep the Embassy City on task and in line, as they do all their Ambassadors. The Hole, as you Grass call it, is the fifth-largest surviving Embassy City on the planet. Keeping the city running is no small task. And more importantly, keeping the Projects running is essential to our continued survival.”

I only nod.

“Our Lords are not unkind masters. In the time that they’ve been here, they’ve been reasonable. They’ve never asked us anything that we couldn’t do. In fact, in many ways, our civilization has never functioned better. That’s why GAP Miyazawa refers to it as our Second Renaissance, as I suppose you know.”

The Second Renaissance. Grass don’t think of it that way, but I don’t tell her that.

“Madame Ambassador.” The Colonel hands her a remote. She picks it up and points it. The images on the screen change.

“This is the House of Lords. That gray building is the original mother ship itself. To use the familiar cultural terminology.”

There it is. The House of Lords, a dark and hulking parasite. I’ve only heard the words before—I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s a ship the size of a giant rain cloud that settled over some kind of abandoned government building near the Old Capitol.

“Beneath it, those white walls? That was the Pentagon. Do you remember the Pentagon?”

I shake my head in awe, looking at Lucas, whose face is completely blank. He’s seen it a thousand times, maybe. It doesn’t mean anything to him anymore. Or maybe it means too much, and he can’t let himself feel anything about it at all—or he’d lose control, like Ro.

I wonder.

The Ambassador’s voice is grim. “When it came to Earth, the House of Lords took over the Pentagon from the inside—like a plug into an electrical socket. There.” She points with her finger, tracing the walls of the building beneath the ship, on the screen.

I see it.

The alien technology looks exactly like a giant black spider that has landed on the building, wrapping each of the five points in its own black ropes. Five sides. Five spider legs. The spider’s black body reflects the five-sided shape of the building below. It’s like the aliens are obsessed with symmetry or something.

I memorize the shape in my mind. Something about it is compelling, in a horrible way. I want to remember it. I realize it’s not just the Pentagon, but the logo of the House of Lords and the Embassy Cities, all of them. The one drawn around Earth in gold, on a field of blood. The world trapped in a birdcage.

The same logo that was on Lucas’s brass buttons.

The Ambassador is staring at me, and I try to find the words to say what I am feeling. I look back to the screen.

“Is it an Icon? The House of Lords?” Seeing it there, I can barely breathe.

“Not technically. As I said, it’s their mother ship. But do you mean, does it emit a pulse field? Yes, I imagine so. GAP Miyazawa believes it does, and he’s the one who has ventured closest to the structure itself. No one has ever tried to board it and find out.”

I flinch, thinking of the General Ambassador surrounded by some other kind of life that seems to depend on the annihilation of ours. In my mind they look like faceless gray shadows. Hollow. Empty. Emotionless.

The No Face.

I wonder if I could feel them. I hope not. I never have. I never want to.

The Ambassador shrugs. “There’s no life surrounding the building, in any event. Not that we’ve ever seen.”

She’s been there. I glance at Lucas. His face is still impassive. I wonder if he’s seen it, too.

She touches the remote again and the screen goes blank.

Without a word, she pushes another button. Images of the Silent Cities flood the screen. Dark city blocks. Fires in the streets. Faces of the dead, lying in rows, like footage from a war. Children slump at their desks. A bus full of lifeless bodies stops at a corner. Corpses in a sold-out stadium remain pinned to plastic seats at a baseball game. Forever fallen in place, resting in something like peace—the kind of violent peace that came to Earth with the Occupation.

Like the Padre, I remember, slumped on the pew beside me.

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I shudder.

We stare in silence at the procession of images. It’s finally Lucas who speaks. He looks at me, and his eyes are dark, like a storm on the water.

“Their hearts stopped beating. They died where they stood. Quietly. Instantly. Every person, every age. Everyone close enough to the Icons.”

“Why?” I breathe the word, though I know why. I just can’t believe there is a point, a meaning, *****ch destruction.

“To show that they could,” says the Ambassador. “That they can.”

They still can. We all know that. Even now, after all these cities, all these years. There is no hope, except to obey.

“Which is what I am telling you when I say I serve two masters. I serve GAP Miyazawa and the Lords, to keep them happy. And in serving the Lords, I serve the people. I am afforded certain luxuries, true. But, more importantly, you are afforded life itself. I’m just trying to keep you alive.” She smiles at me, as cold a smile as I have ever felt.

Lucas looks back at me, grim. “To keep it from happening again.”

“What about the Projects?” I say, thinking about the cars full of Remnants that were with me on the Tracks.

“Excuse me?” She frowns.

“The Remnant slaves. Who serves them?”

“A small price, to keep the Lords at peace. Don’t you think?” She leans forward. “We’re all slaves, Doloria. You. Me. My son. Even GAP Miyazawa. We can’t change that.”

She makes my skin crawl.

I think of Lucas and his mother as belonging to the House of Lords. I think of them as having made their pact with the devil. And yet deep down I realize things are more complicated than that.

Maybe she has as little choice in the matter as I do.

The Colonel, standing in the shadows, clears his throat.

“Madame Ambassador.”

The Ambassador pushes a button, and the images on the vid-screen disappear.

“That’s enough.” Her tone has shifted, and she is done with me. I am dismissed.

Oddly enough, I am somehow disappointed—and then I am ashamed that I care.

“Why am I here?” My words are so quiet, even I have a hard time hearing them. “What do you want from me?”

“Do not question that you are here for a reason. There is nothing I do that is not in the name of protecting my Embassy City. You are my guest here, for now. If we find you to be less than cooperative, that will change.” I don’t doubt it; the cuff marks around my wrist are only now starting to fade.

She moves around her desk and grabs my bony arm with her bony hand. I shrink at our connection, but the images come barreling at me, all the same. She is steely metal and rough rivets. Her strength is beautiful and industrial and terrifying. Still, I can sense her eyes moving over me. Her words are quiet—almost a whisper.

“There are those who cannot understand the delicate concept of balance. Compromise. Some do not understand why we make the sacrifices we make, or what could happen to us at the hands of our displeased Lords.”

Some. The Grass Factions, the Rebellion. She doesn’t have to say it.

“You’re going to help us. You, and my son. And even, perhaps, the Rager.”

Ro. Where is Ro?

“Why?”

“Because you’re one of the lucky ones. Not your brothers. Not your parents. You.”

She knows my family. Then I catch myself. Of course she knows. She’s the Ambassador. She knows everything.

She lifts her other hand. The one not touching my arm. In her fingers, she holds a necklace. A cross. It is gold and tiny. I recognize it immediately. My mother never took it off, the Padre was so proud to tell me.

It’s in every picture I’ve seen of her.

A surge of pain floods through me. I think the tears will roll down my face, but they don’t. They run down the inside of my body. They course through my veins where I used to have blood, saltier than ocean water.

“You lived so you could pay the debt.”

Me.

She says it again. I find it harder and harder to breathe.

What debt?

“You’ll need to cooperate now. Do you understand? To keep more terrible things from happening, to more people you love.”

It’s a threat, and she looks me in the eyes as she says it.

“Madame Ambassador—” begins Lucas.

“Not now, Lucas,” she snaps, shutting him down.

My eyes flicker over to Lucas. He looks to the distance, studying the patterns in the carpet.

The Ambassador smiles at me. “It’s a shame, you know. What happened to the Padre. After so many years of service to the people.”

She leans close. I smell perfume and sweat and stale air.

I pull back, a reflex. “He never did anything.”

“He had something of mine, something very important. He should have known better.”

I want to vomit. Instead, I spit the words out at her. “I don’t belong to you. I don’t belong to anyone.”

She laughs. “Not you, child. Though hiding you from me, that was also very, very ill advised.”

I flush at her laughter.

“I’m talking about something else. My soldiers have ripped apart your little Mission, stone by stone, trying to find it for me.”

“What?” I try not to look at her. I stare straight ahead at a speck on the wall. My heart is pounding.

“It’s a book.” She says it, clipped and precise.

No—

“About people like you and my son.”

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No, no, no—

“There isn’t another like it, not anywhere in the world. It was taken from me a long time ago, and I would very much like to have it back.”

That stupid, damn book. What did it say? What did he want me to know? Why does she want it? Where is it now?

I allow myself to look at her.

Once.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen a book like that.”

She leans closer. “Think about it, Doloria. Take all the time you need. I believe you just might remember.”

She presses the necklace into my hand, hard, and releases me. My fingers close around it and I want to run, sobbing, out of her office. I want to scream and cry and heave everything off the top of her polished desk with both hands.

I don’t.

I take my mother’s necklace and back away. Leaving Lucas, leaving the Ambassador, leaving the Brass Wings Man and the Silent Cities behind. I feel like I will hyperventilate, but I don’t.

I understand.

“Dol, wait!” Lucas calls after me. But I know better than to stop. He lied. I shouldn’t have trusted him. He can’t protect me.

I’m not Lucas Amare.

I’m not the golden child of the Ambassador.

I’m just an orphaned Grassgirl, here to be used and discarded, like her Padre, like her parents, like everyone else on the planet.

RESEARCH MEMORANDUM: THE HUMANITY PROJECT

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / AMBASSADOR EYES ONLY

To: Ambassador Amare

From: Dr. Huxley-Clarke

Subject: Icon Children Mythology

Subtopic: Weeper

Catalogue Assignment: Evidence recovered during raid of Rebellion hideout

The following is a reprint of a recovered page, thick, homemade paper, thought to be torn from an anti-Embassy propaganda tract titled Icon Children Exist! Most likely hand-published by a fanatical cult or Grass Rebellion faction.

Text-scan translation follows.

10

THE TRIGGER

The moment I leave the Ambassador’s office, four Sympa guards descend on me.

They’re in front of me, behind me, on all sides. They jostle and push, closer and closer, until I can feel the warmth of their sweat and their breath and their adrenaline and fear and I can’t breathe.

The Sympas carry me into a hall with buzzing, bare bulbs and rows of gray, sealed plexi-doors. Everything is locked. Everything is meant to intimidate.

I am shoved into a small, plain room with a small, plain table and two gray chairs. The walls are reflective—of me, of nothing, the nothing in the room.

I am alone.

It hits me that I can’t do or say anything to get myself out of this mess, while the Embassy can say or do whatever they like, as long as they have me here. I don’t know why this is surprising.

That I am powerless, as always.

I unclench my hand to see the tiny gold cross and the fragile chain.

My mother.

First my family, then the Padre. I wonder if I am only alive, as the Ambassador says, to pay for their deaths.

I drop the necklace on the metal table in front of me.

Here, now, where I have no one, I am overwhelmed by my feelings for my parents—for my mother.

The hundreds and thousands of losses, the things that will never happen between us, writhe around the little cross, around me—until the entire room is full of them.

I see the baby, howling in the crib. My mother, looking up as the radio falls silent. My father, rolling down the stairs.

I close my eyes but I see them still. I can’t stop seeing them. My memories have overtaken me; I can’t push them down, no matter how hard I try. Not now. Now they’re pushing me back—and I feel myself breaking.

I go to the door and begin to pound. I don’t stop until the sides of my hands are sore and bruised and my throat is hoarse from screaming.

You can’t do this to me You can’t treat me like this I didn’t do anything to you I’m a human being

The rush of words comes loose from me. I don’t know what I say, only what I feel.

The plexi slides open beneath my fists and I find myself pounding at the Colonel. His bald head gleams under the harsh lighting, and for a moment, the jagged scar encircling his head looks like a black halo.

“It’s not necessary to scream. These rooms are wired. We can hear you perfectly clearly, if you use your normal speaking voice.”

I stare at him blankly. The rooms are wired.

“I wanted to yell.” It’s all I can manage to spit out. It doesn’t sound like me, but I don’t feel like myself, either.

I’m too angry.

“Well, that’s fine, then. Useful data, which is of course why we’re here today. I hope you will cooperate.” He looks at me meaningfully.

“Useful data? What are you talking about?” I glare uncooperatively.

“Please, have a seat. There’s no reason to exert yourself. We’ve quite enough data on you, as it is. Thanks to that little display.”

I want to throw the chair at him, but instead I sit in it.

“My name is Colonel Catallus. I am the Chief Security Officer, Advisor to the Ambassador.”

Chief Sympa thug, I think.

“I will be conducting your inquiry.” The man holds up some kind of sleek tablet, waving it in front of me. “Just a digi-text. Not a torture device.” He smiles and his teeth are artificially white, white as bone. “Now. Tell me about your mother. What little you know. Since she seems to be the trigger.”

I frown. “Trigger?”

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I don’t like the way he talks. I don’t like his face, either, so I look at his jacket, covered with military emblems. Medals. Stars. Again, the pair of small brass wings.

“All emotional states have triggers. We pull the trigger and you fire. That’s how this works.”

He smiles, but it’s not meant to make me feel any better. He wants something—I just can’t tell what.

Not yet.

I stare at the wings for what feels like an eternity before I respond. “I’m not a gun.”

“I didn’t say you were.” He smiles.

“I don’t have a trigger.”

“All right. You don’t believe you do; that’s useful too.” He smiles again, tapping on his digi-text, and I want to punch him in the face. “Let’s talk about your necklace.”

The necklace. I stuff it in my pocket. “No.”

“It was very kind of the Ambassador to arrange for you to have it, don’t you think?”

I say nothing.

“You lost both your parents on The Day. I see that in your file. And this.”

He flips his digi-text toward me. There, in the ten inches between his hands, he holds a photograph of my home.

Of what used to be my home.

In what used to be my neighborhood.

I have seen photographs of this room. Pictures of large hands holding a small me in the water, a dark-haired, pink-skinned naked baby who looked more like a frog. In this picture, though, there is no baby. No rubber duck. There are no people at all, at least not where you can see them.

I can only see the edge of the tarp covering the bodies if I look very closely at the black patch at the bottom of the frame. It almost blends in with the dark pattern on the torn blue wallpaper.

I look away.

My eyes fill with tears and I hate myself for giving in to them. They burn as they slide down my face.

“It’s your home, isn’t it? Where you lived with your mother and your father?”

“And my brothers,” I say automatically. Before I can stop myself.

Colonel Catallus smiles broadly, so I know I must have said something wrong.

“Of course. You had two brothers, correct? Pepi and…”

“Angel,” I say, closing my eyes. I can see them, their dirty knees and their uncut hair from the photographs, but I can’t see their faces. Not anymore. Where they should have faces they only have blank, black shadows. Same as the shadow over their heads, over our house, over our city. Same as the shadow over the world, the one that settled upon us one day and never left.

The shadows overwhelm me. I don’t want to see them anymore. I don’t want to talk about them. I want the Brass Wings Man to stop.

I have to stop him, I think.

I have to, and I can.

I reconsider the man in front of me. I explore him with my mind, pushing past the coldness that comes when I touch him. There’s a wall of pure ice where there should be something alive inside him, and I search for a crack, anything to let me in.

As I suspected, the ice isn’t real—it’s a facade—and it gives way as soon as I concentrate. One push, and the paper doll his mind has been hiding behind falls like an autumn leaf, a snowflake.

It blows away and I am left with the ugly truth of an ugly mind. An ugly life.

I feel my way up and down and past and through him. He is small and afraid and coiled. He is slippery and beige. Inside him, when I reach all the way inside, there is nothing. An empty space with a small pebble rolling around, making a rattling noise where there should have been something else.

A heart. A soul. There is nothing.

Except, now, me.

“What are you doing?” He sounds surprised.

I don’t answer.

“Doloria.” His voice is a warning, but I don’t stop. I am doing things I have never done before. I’ve found a new weapon, and I want to use it. I want to hurt him with it.

I see the faces of his dead mother and father. His cats. He smuggles them soft food from the Blackhole Market.

A bottle of strong drink. An empty chair.

There’s more. Come on. Show me, I think. I want to see it all. And then I do.

“Enough!”

I open my eyes.

“There was a girl. You let her die. Why?”

In my mind, I see the face of the dead girl, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, and I can think of nothing else. She didn’t die the way the Padre did. Quietly, in a chapel. Someone didn’t just take away the beating of her heart. Someone hurt her, on purpose. To make her scream. To be cruel.

He did. This man. He likes to hurt people, in ways I do not want to imagine. I’ve seen enough already.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He reaches up with his hand and presses a button on a panel, shutting down the machines in the room and, I’m guessing, cutting us off from the rest of the Embassy.

Anything can happen now. We are alone, in this room. He could kill me if he wanted to. Still, I don’t stop. I can’t.

“Who is she? A Skin? An accident?”

“Nobody,” he says. “Nothing.”

“Like me?”

The brass wings glint as Colonel Catallus stands. He is white with rage, shaking so much he almost can’t make the words come out.

“Stop right now, Doloria. I’m not an Icon Child. I’m not the one being studied, here.” He takes a breath and smiles with his teeth. That’s what he does with his anger, Colonel Catallus. He smiles. “If you get in my way, I’ll kill you. I have no problem with that.”

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Inwardly, I shiver—because I know he speaks the truth. But I won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing it. “Like you killed the Padre.”

“You have many triggers, Doloria Maria de la Cruz. But don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll find them all. One way or another.” His mouth twitches. Please don’t smile, I think. “It’ll be a fun game for us, won’t it?”

I stare at him.

He sits forward, raising his voice. “Now get out of my mind.”

“Make me.”

“Get out. You can’t treat me like this. I’m a human being.” For a moment, he catches me off guard. Then I realize he’s mocking me. He’s saying the words I said, or something like them.

“Stop.”

He shrugs. “I don’t know what you think you saw, Doloria, but you will never speak of those things again.”

“Or what,” I say evenly.

Colonel Catallus smiles again, and I want to scream. He presses a button at the side of the plexi-door. The wall facing me slides upward, and I see that it is no wall at all but a window.

On the other side of the window is Ro.

“Or this.”

He presses another button, and I see my own face projected on the long window in Ro’s room. I see myself pounding on the doors, screaming a stream of almost unintelligible words.

“We all have our triggers.” Colonel Catallus exhales, apparently feeling like himself again.

Ro’s face is flushed and sweating.

“And Doloria? I’m fairly certain he is a gun.”

Ro’s hands curl into fists.

A Sympa guard, standing next to the door, looks like he desperately wishes he was outside the room. He’s as armored and padded as I’ve ever seen a person. But I know why he’s there, why he had to be on the inside.

Within Ro’s reach.

No.

Colonel Catallus smiles, pushing the button harder. He’s enjoying this, I can feel it.

The Doloria in the room with Ro screams louder and louder. Ro covers his ears, rocking back and forth in his chair.

Ro, don’t. I’m fine. I’m right here.

The chair goes flying, then the table. Now his hands are around the Sympa’s neck. Now the Sympa is flying. He’s so heavily protected he will be hard to kill. I think it only makes Ro angrier.

My own window rattles as the Sympa hits it. I wince, but the window holds. Colonel Catallus only smiles more broadly.

“Stop it. Ro’s going to kill him.”

“This is science, Doloria. Do you know how long it’s taken us to find you?”

“No.” I can’t take my eyes off Ro. The rest seems insignificant, right at this moment.

“You’ve no idea, the valuable research data you and your friend are giving us.”

A camera, high in the corner of the ceiling, follows Ro as Colonel Catallus speaks. I think he is talking, but I’m not listening. I’m watching the Sympa die. Ro can’t see what he’s doing, and he can’t stop himself from doing it.

Maybe he is a gun, I think.

Maybe I am a trigger.

The Sympa hits the wall again. It shakes so hard I think it will collapse. A spray of blood drips on the glass between us.

Even Colonel Catallus looks a bit taken aback. “As I was saying. Very valuable. Definitely worth the cost.”

Ro. In the name of the Lady, get hold of yourself.

“Please.” I look at Colonel Catallus. “Stop him. I’ll do anything.”

“Anything?” he asks, with a grim face. I nod. Of course. All he cares about is saving his own skin. He wants to know he has nothing to fear from me.

“I’ll never speak of your personal life again. I swear, Colonel.”

He opens the door and I run.

“Ro!” I scream. The soldier is frozen in the corner of the room, choking on his own spit, though Ro isn’t touching him. He doesn’t have to. I see the red waves coming off him, the energy that pulses through the room.

“Ro!”

The Sympa’s eyes roll in my direction. He makes a gurgling noise. Desperate.

I pull Ro toward me. Blood streams from the Sympa’s eyes.

“Furo Costas.”

“Doloria,” he says. He repeats my name like a chant, over and over, focusing the red waves on me.

I don’t flinch. I never do.

I take him in my arms, wrapping myself around his raging heart although it burns us both.

RESEARCH MEMORANDUM: THE HUMANITY PROJECT

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / AMBASSADOR EYES ONLY

To: Ambassador Amare

Subject: Icon Children

Subtopic: Genetics

Catalogue Assignment: Evidence recovered during raid of Rebellion hideout

Handwritten notes, transcription follows:

GENETICS OF EMOTION:

ALL EMOTION IS CONTROLLED AND MODERATED BY THE LIMBIC SYSTEM OF THE BRAIN.

BUT OUR BRAIN HAS EVOLVED AND PUT UP SAFEGUARDS, LIMITS.

SO OUR POWER TO FEEL IS MODERATED, HELD BACK, FOR REASONS THAT ARE NOW OBSOLETE.

THE BRAIN’S LIMBIC SYSTEM IS DETERMINED BY OUR DNA.

THE BLUEPRINT.

IF I CAN ALTER THE DNA, CUSTOMIZE IT TO TWEAK THE LIMBIC SYSTEM, I CAN REMOVE THE MECHANISM THAT IS HOLDING US BACK.

CUT THE BRAKES. OPEN THE FLOODGATES.

UNLEASH OUR TRUE POTENTIAL.

WE MAY NEED IT.

11

TOGETHER AGAIN

In the darkness I hear a sound, something knocking at a door. I try to answer, try to just open my eyes, but I cannot.

It’s the Padre, I think. I’ve slept through my chores. The pigs must be hungry. Then I drift back into the dark, knowing that sometimes even the pigs must wait.

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Ro will do it.

I can depend on Ro.

The darkness is thick and soft and warm. It reassures me that I am right, and then I am gone.

Later, I feel someone shaking me. It must be Bigger. I must be in the way of the stove.

I open my eyes. I am not in the Mission. I am staring at the door of Examination Facility #9B. I am on the floor, holding on to the air vent with one hand. Ro is on his knees, looking down at me, grabbing me by both arms.

“Dol, wake up. Are you okay?” He’s dressed, at least in pants, though his hair is standing straight up. He has bruises under his eyes, and his hands are bandaged.

“They must have given you something. I thought you’d never wake up.”

He looks stricken. I watch his eyes while he waits for me to remember. The guard and the room and the horrible Colonel Catallus.

I remember it all.

I also know something he doesn’t. They didn’t drug me. They didn’t have to. The way I feel now—broken and empty and depleted—this is what happens when I let the feelings come. My hands and mouth and stomach and eyes are burning dry. I try to make my eyes come into sharper focus, but I can only see the wires reconnecting me to the hospital walls once again.

I turn my head, slowly.

A tray of food sits on a table next to the bed.

I lift my hand. Caught between my fingers, I see the delicate gold chain of my mother’s necklace.

It doesn’t matter.

I’m not a daughter. Not anymore, and not to the Embassy. I’m a weapon, just like Ro.

A single tear rolls down from the corner of my eye. I close them so I don’t have to see it fall.

Then I feel Ro, warm as the lost stove in my lost kitchen, pulling himself down onto the floor beside me, leaning his head against my back.

“Shh. I’m here, Dol. It’s okay. We’ll get out of this. I’ll find a way to get us home.”

His big hand curls around my littler one, his thick arm around my thinner one. There is no cake on his face today, no twig in his hair.

Once again I let myself fade into a faraway world where there are no babies screaming in cribs—no silent radios, no rag-doll fathers, no crossless mothers.

And all the hearts are beating. Every last one.

I hear the door click open, and bolt upright.

I only have a moment to realize Ro is sleeping with his whole arm across my stomach, trapping me with half his body.

Then the door is open and Lucas is standing over us.

“Oh. Sorry. I—I didn’t realize I’d be interrupting.” I see his hand gesture, helplessly.

I rub my eyes. “Lucas? What are you doing here?” I look at him, confused, and then look over to Ro.

Ro’s snoring, one leg twitching. Probably chasing rabbits or Sympas in his dreams. I can smell the Ro-smell, the sweat and the dirty hair and the brown, tanned skin, from here. No matter how clean he gets, he still smells like mud and grass and the ocean.

I turn slowly back to Lucas, who is bright red. I don’t want to look him in the eye.

“You’re not interrupting. We had a hard time sleeping. After—everything.” I can’t bring myself to refer to my conversation with Colonel Catallus any more than that. I can feel my own eyes narrowing. “But I guess you know that.”

I don’t have to explain. I remind myself Lucas has no reason to care about me, just as I have no reason to care about him.

Ro turns over, snoring, which doesn’t help things.

“Right. Obviously. He can’t sleep.” Lucas laughs, but he doesn’t smile.

I lower my voice. It would not be good for anyone if Ro woke up now. “Can I help you with something, Lucas? Is there a reason you’re here?”

“I’m sorry. About before.” He sounds anguished. “It’s just, I knew there was no way to stop her—”

“Don’t.” I hold up my hand. I can’t let him finish.

“They told me you were quarantined.” He can’t say anything else. That I’ve been trapped and cornered and tested—and failed every part of it all. At least, failed myself and Ro.

Because I couldn’t keep them from seeing what we do. Not any more than Lucas could stop them from forcing us to do it.

So I only shrug. “They were probably afraid it was contagious.”

“Being an Icon Child?”

“Being Grass.”

“What if it is?” He stares at me for a long time. As if there was any kind of answer to his question. As if his mother wasn’t the Ambassador. As if he didn’t already know where his whole life was going to lead him.

Not to the Grass.

I stand up, sliding expertly from beneath Ro’s deadweight arm.

“It’s not. So you can tell them not to worry about it. Tell her. We don’t want you.”

I push him out the door and close it before the tears come.

It has been two days since our “conversation” with Colonel Catallus.

They haven’t sent for us again. Not Colonel Catallus or the Ambassador.

Not a single Sympa.

Ro stays in my room with me. They must know he’s there, but if they do, they haven’t said anything about it.

The first day we are exhausted and do nothing but sleep. By the second morning, though, we are starving, and there is no sign of a food tray coming.

That’s when Ro and I decide it is time to think strategically. We need a plan beyond anger. We need to find a way to get out of here.

Time to venture beyond Santa Catalina Examination Facility #9B.

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We walk the long halls of the Medical Wing, looking straight ahead, keeping to one side of the corridor. “Don’t speak to anyone,” says Ro. “We just need to get our hands on a food tray.”

“We need more than that,” I say.

He nods. “But first, food. We should probably load up. We can’t just walk out of here, and we don’t know how long it could take to find a way to escape.”

“Don’t talk about it,” I say, lowering my voice. “Not inside.”

I point up at the round grating in the ceiling.

“Got it.”

The room with the door marked CAFETERIA is full of people when we enter. Doctors, officers, Sympa guards. The room is huge and the ceiling is plexi, seamed by metal ribbing that reminds me of the carcass of an animal who has come to die in our field and his flesh rotted away.

The windows would let the light in, if there was light. There are only clouds, though. So the glass lets the gray in.

I see Lucas at a table in nearly the center of the room. Just seeing him makes me stumble into a chair as I pass by, but I collect myself.

Ro lets his hand brush against mine, letting me feel his presence. “Easy there, Dodo. We’ll just grab a couple trays and go.”

I swallow a smile. Ro hasn’t asked me anything about Lucas, not directly, but he hasn’t said anything, either. To be honest, there isn’t much Ro and I have wanted to talk about, these last few days. His “conversation” with the Sympa was probably harder to endure than the one I had with Colonel Catallus.

Either way, they aren’t conversations we will be having again. Not if we can help it.

Lucas catches my eye. He sits stiffly beside the silver-haired girl, the one from the Chopper. She looked almost like an apparition then, and she doesn’t look real here, either; now that I can get a closer look at her, I see she’s slight as wild bamboo. Her fingers flutter as she talks, moving with a different emphasis for every word. They tell stories, her fingers, like a dance. It’s mesmerizing.

My mind stretches toward her, and I catch flashes of terrible things. Disasters and creatures. Storms and slides and fires. I pull back, and she turns toward me.

Strange.

She shouldn’t have felt it, shouldn’t have felt anything. Most people can’t. And yet it looks like she has, just as Colonel Catallus did, during his stupid test. I know Ro can feel me when I am connecting to him. It seemed like Lucas could, too.

But why can she?

The girl is painfully beautiful, and it’s only now that she fixes her eyes firmly in my direction that I realize I am staring.

Ro pulls me, gently, closer to the food counters. A reminder. He is here. I relax into him, letting the heat in my stomach radiate through me.

Moments later, when my tray is full, I follow Ro toward the door.

“When you get to the door, ***ch the trays, just carry as much as you can.” He speaks quietly, only to me.

“Fast,” I say. I’m not comfortable talking about our plan to leave, but given the lunchtime clamor in the room, I’m not sure Doc could hear us.

“Where are you two going?”

Lucas stands between us and the door. He looks smug, like he’s caught us in the act of some anti-Embassy crime—which, in a way, he has.

“Nowhere. Back to our rooms.” I don’t smile.

Ro steps up next to me. “Too many Stooges around, Buttons. A guy could lose his appetite in here.”

Lucas frowns. “You can’t take trays out of the cafeteria. Embassy rules.” He’s being awful. He knows he is.

I slammed the door, I think. He’s hurt. That’s what this is.

I reach for him but all I feel is a cold stripe of black fog.

“What, are you going to tell on us to Mommy?” Ro practically snarls.

“No. Not her.” Lucas smiles. “Doc? Could you secure the cafeteria doors? There seems to be a breach of protocol.”

I hear Doc’s voice before I can interrupt. “Initiating locking sequence now. Doors are locked, Lucas. Notifying Embassy personnel of protocol breach. Officers will be dispatched shortly.”

Ro tenses. I can see what’s going through his mind. He’s three seconds shy of running for it.

I shake my head slightly.

No. Not now.

We need to see what happens around here.

We need to know what is going on.

Lucas gestures to the table behind him. The only empty seats in the entire room are at his table. Of course. He probably arranged that.

Or perhaps no one here dares sit with him.

Only the silver-haired girl.

Ro sighs. “Just eat fast.”

I don’t want to eat.

I know that if I walk over there, I will have to meet a girl who holds terrible things in her mind, and be forced to talk to Lucas, who delivered me to his mother.

More new people, with complicated lives and complicated emotions that I will have no choice but to feel, or at least make the exhausting effort not to feel.

I want to run.

Instead, I follow Lucas toward the table.

Ro kicks out a chair and slides up to the table, dropping his trays, which are piled high with crusty loaves of bread, lumps of soft cheese, whole fruits, and handfuls of nuts.

Lucas eyes Ro’s two trays, stacked on top of each other, a layer of food-laden bowls and plates on each. “Don’t hold back. You should really try to eat something.”

“And you’ve got a real future as a comedian, Buttons.” Ro takes a bite out of a massive loaf of bread.

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Nobody else says a word. The girl looks like she wants to stab Ro in the face with her fork.

I sit between Ro and Lucas, across from the silver-haired girl. I wonder if I will be able to eat a thing, sitting so close *****ch an unsettling presence. Even her clothes are gray and silver, the colors of the steel-reinforced room around us. As if she wears institutional camouflage.

Lucas ignores Ro, speaking only to me. “I’m glad you’re feeling better. Eat up. We’ll wait for you, if you like. Then we could show you guys around, or whatever. I mean, if you wanted.”

He’s testing the waters, pretending everything is fine. Like he hasn’t just locked us in this room, or handed us off to the Ambassador. But I want him to know where we stand.

The waters are rough.

“I’m not hungry.” I’m starving, but I know I’m right; I’d no more be able to eat in this room with these people than I could fly.

The silver-haired girl watches us, but she never stops moving, as if she’s a whole constellation of actions rather than just one person. I look away but I can still sense her. Inside, she is not a quiet person, or a happy one. I keep my eyes open, not letting myself blink. If I do, I’m afraid I will see the disasters behind her eyes again. She doesn’t want me to see them, I know that much. I wonder what she’s hiding, and why.

“You’re the girl Lucas found. I saw you, that day at the beach. Up the Tracks.” It’s an accusation, almost a crime. She says Lucas’s name as if it is an Embassy holiday, the word ringing out in the great empty space.

Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Lucas Amare.

For all I know, his birthday really is a holiday around here.

“Dol,” says Lucas. “Her name is Dol.”

“Really? What a strange name.” She doesn’t smile, and I realize she isn’t joking.

“Is it?” I don’t smile back. She doesn’t seem to care either way.

“Orwell? Tell us about this Dol person, please?” She lifts her head as she speaks, raising her voice toward the center of the table.

I see the circular grating before I hear Doc’s voice. She speaks differently to him, more comfortably. He can’t hurt her, this Doc-with-no-body. It makes sense that she would prefer him to the rest of us.

“Certainly, Timora. What would you like to know?” Doc says her name with even precision, stressing all the syllables equally. Ti-mo-ra. Ro almost jumps out of his chair. It’s been three days, but he can’t get used to Doc’s bodiless presence. Life in the Grass will do that to you.

The girl examines me, up and down. “Start with her criminal record, Orwell. I’m guessing it’s lengthy.”

“I’ll start now.”

“Ti-mo-ra? I see why you’re so sensitive about names.” I shrug. I can’t resist.

“She’s just Tima,” Lucas says, drinking from a cup. He shoots Tima a meaningful look. “And like I said, this is Dol.”

“Whatever.” We say it in unison, and then glance at each other, startled.

Ro looks up from shoveling eggs and potatoes into his mouth, pausing to catch my eye.

Tima picks up a silver cup, and for the first time, I see her arm. It’s stitched with colorful embroidery thread in a precise pattern. Scarring—more permanent than henna or ink—lifts each thread, rising into thin lines that will soon overwhelm the stitching itself.

It’s a blood tattoo. This is the first time I’ve seen one, myself. I don’t recognize the design, but three different colors of thread swirl into three shared spirals. Sort of like a yin and yang, I think, but with three parts.

I can’t help but imagine drawing the needle through the skin, pulling the thread tight. The pain is terrifying.

My pulse starts to race. She sees me looking at the tattoo.

“Who did that to you?” The pattern hurts my eyes.

She traces the thread with her finger. “I did this to myself.”

Ro whistles. “You are one freaky chica. And I think I just lost my appetite.”

She ignores him. “It’s a triad, a Gnostic symbol. The three levels of existence. You know, the world soul?”

“The world has a soul?” I don’t know anything about a world soul, though I like the sound of it. The world I know feels like a pretty soulless place.

“Some people think so. It used to.” The girl cuts me off with a look, tapping on the table again. She turns back to the grating. “Any luck, Orwell?”

“De la Cruz, Doloria Maria. Date of birth, 2070. I apologize, Tima. All ad***ional records are sealed.”

“That’s interesting. There should be more.” Tima frowns.

“I apologize again, Tima. Your search has been suspended by a priority communication directed to all four of you. Your instructor has requested your presence in the classroom. Lucas, I will override your command and unlock the doors now.”

“Great,” says Lucas. He looks at Tima, annoyed.

She sighs. “I see. So we aren’t supposed to snoop. Whatever. He could just say it to my face.”

“Who?” I ask, my heart immediately starting to beat faster. Ro looks up, as if he can sense me going on edge, which I suspect he can.

Lucas doesn’t answer. Instead, he shoves his plate away.

“Who?” I ask it again, even though I already know.

It’s Tima who answers. “You’ve met him. Colonel Catallus. He calls himself our teacher but it’s really more of a sadistic jailor kind of thing.”

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I want to bolt out of the room, but I force myself to be still. I try to calm down.

Instead, I stare at Tima’s plate. It is empty, except for a single hard-boiled egg, with a single cut across the top. The remaining eggshell is completely intact and completely hollow. Not a drop of the egg’s flesh remains. Who eats an egg like that? I think. Who cares so much about the proper consumption of an egg? Then again, who stitches her own skin?

I find myself wondering what else she can do.

“No,” says Ro, calmly. He doesn’t even put down his fork. “We’re not going to see that psychopath.”

“He’s right,” I say, quietly.

If we hadn’t already been planning on going, we would certainly be leaving now. A conversation with Colonel Catallus is not something we can risk enduring twice.

“What did he do to you?” Tima’s face twists as she speaks, averting her eyes. The silver in her hair gleams, the light reflecting from a thousand tiny gestures she probably doesn’t realize she makes. She’s like a bird. Like a nervous, flighty bird.

I can’t tell her anything. “We had a conversation, I guess.”

“You’re lying. He can’t control himself, especially now that it’s his job.”

“What?”

“That’s why you’re here, you know. For the tests.” Tima looks at Lucas, and he looks at his plate, ashamed—as if they can imagine exactly what happened between Ro and Colonel Catallus and me.

“That true, Buttons?” Ro looks up, still smiling. He’s trying not to let her get to him.

I concentrate harder, and see a flash of the truth behind Tima—a series of shifting images, one after the other. Tima, writhing in pain, watching helplessly while Lucas suffers his own test in the next room.

“It’s true,” I say, without looking at either one of them.

Ro glares at Tima, and I feel his annoyance. His rise of anger. “So what if he did try to poke at us? It’s none of your business, so lay off.”

Tima returns Ro’s look. She, who is afraid of so many things they crowd my brain, is not afraid of him. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m impressed.

Then she leans forward, pulling a pen from her pocket. She writes two words, on the backs of her hands.

She picks up her plate in one hand and her cup in the other, extending them to me.

“Do you mind bussing my plate, Grass? It goes back there, to the kitchen.”

I want to throw them at her, until I see her hands.

One says KITCHEN.

The other says GARBAGE.

There must be a door in the kitchen. Somewhere they keep the trash. Some kind of way out.

She’s helping us go.

I’m surprised. I see a flash of hatred in her eyes, though, and I understand.

She feels about Lucas the way I feel about Ro.

Family that is not family.

A love so strong, you can’t tell where you end and the other person begins.

I get it.

She wants to help, not because she feels sorry for us, but because she wants us gone.

Ro looks at me, questioningly, when he sees her hands. Lucas pushes his chair back, shaking his head.

“What’s the point, Tima? It’s no use.”

Tima motions her hand in the direction of the nearest grating, raising her voice for Doc’s benefit. “The point is she’s some lowly Grass. So is the boy. They should know their place. As long as they’re here, they can act like the garbage they are. Until someone shuttles them out with the trash.”

The garbage shuttle. That’s what I hear. There is a way off this island. Tima has worked through it in her head, just like that, while we sit here. They put out the trash. Go while you can.

She raises her voice. “I said, take the plate. Now.”

I back away from the table. Ro grabs the plate and the cup out of Tima’s hands, following.

Tima catches my arm before I go.

I am not sure what passes between us, a moment of trust or anger or something else entirely. But she lets me see one more thing.

She rolls her arm slowly toward me. The blood tattoo slides out of sight; I expect another one. I don’t expect this.

Three silver dots on the inside of her wrist.

She’s one of us—and not one of us—too. Like Lucas.

She’s the third Icon Child.

Fear.

That’s when I begin to understand. Tima may not be afraid of Ro, but I have every right to be afraid of her.

Even though she appears frightened, she is lethal—maybe more deadly than Ro. If I stand in her way, she will come for me. Calculated. Precise. One careful stitch at a time.

She closes her eyes and I see the truth.

I see blood and death and chaos. I see the lengths she will go for the person she loves.

Fear is a dangerous thing.

I grab Ro’s arm and flee toward the kitchen, before she can change her mind. He runs as fast as I do, maybe faster.

He’s seen her marking, too.

RESEARCH MEMORANDUM: THE HUMANITY PROJECT

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / AMBASSADOR EYES ONLY

To: Ambassador Amare

From: Dr. Huxley-Clarke

Subject: Icon Children Mythology

Subtopic: Freak

Catalogue Assignment: Evidence recovered during raid of Rebellion hideout

The following is a reprint of a recovered page, thick, homemade paper, thought to be torn from an anti-Embassy propaganda tract titled Icon Children Exist! Most likely hand-published by a fanatical cult or Grass Rebellion faction.

Text-scan translation follows.