Inheritance

On Saturday, Reese’s father took her and David to Angel Island. She had thought about what Eres told her at the end of their last lesson. She was determined, today, to let the teacher see everything; she wanted to know how to use this adaptive ability. She didn’t expect to see Amber sitting in one of the chairs when the door to Eres’s room opened.

“Good morning,” Eres said, standing up. The teacher’s gray robe hung down to the floor in one long column. With white hair and a pale face, Eres was almost ghostly.

“Hi,” Amber said, standing as well. She was dressed in jeans and a baby-blue T-shirt that had MISSION stamped on it, her face bare of makeup, a lock of her hair held back with a plain clip. She looked so utterly ordinary in the triangular space with its luminous walls that Reese found it completely jarring.

“Hi,” David said warily.

“What are you doing here?” Reese asked. She had finally begun to forget about Amber—hadn’t she?—and now here she was, biting her lip and looking like a nice girl. Reese’s feet planted in the doorway; she couldn’t move any farther into the room. She wouldn’t.

“We’re going to do something different today,” Eres said. “David, I’m going to work with you individually. And, Reese, you are going to work with Amber.”

“What? Why?”

“I spoke with Amber since the last time you were here,” Eres said. “I believe it will be helpful for you to spend some time working with her.”

Reese glanced at David. He didn’t look happy. “I don’t think working with Amber will help,” Reese said to Eres.

Amber’s face darkened, but she didn’t speak.

“How will you know if you don’t try?” Eres asked.

Reese couldn’t answer the question. I just know sounded too much like something an impertinent kid might say, but that was the only thing Reese could come up with.

“Amber, the two of you should go somewhere private,” Eres said. “David and I will stay here.” Eres sat down again, clearly waiting for Amber and Reese to leave.

Amber headed for the door. Reese backed away so that Amber didn’t touch her when she passed. “Come on,” Amber said, waiting in the corridor.

Reese looked at David, hoping for a way out, but his expression was guarded. He shook his head very slightly as if to say It’s your decision, and then he sat down to face Eres. Reese realized the only options she had were to go with Amber or to throw a temper tantrum and refuse to do as Eres asked. The stern expression on Eres’s face made Reese think the teacher would definitely not take kindly to the latter. So she turned away from Eres and David and stiffly followed Amber into the corridor. She wished that Amber didn’t still affect her so strongly.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” Amber asked tentatively. “We don’t have to stay inside. It’s a beautiful day.”

The corridor was dim and claustrophobic, and the idea of going outside seemed like a lifeline to Reese. “Yes. Let’s go outside.”

Amber led the way through the ship, and Reese kept her eyes on the floor. Amber was wearing her purple Converse sneakers. Reese flashed back to the first time she had noticed them, the day they’d had coffee at the cafe across from the park. She shoved the memory away angrily. Stop it, she told herself. Everything is different now.

As they exited the ship, walking down the ramp, Amber pointed at the yellow Victorian houses across the road. “Those were the officers’ quarters. There’s a building up there with a sign that says ‘Bake House.’ Apparently the soldiers liked their fresh-baked bread.”

“How do you know that?” Reese asked.

“There’s a plaque over there that explains it. This place used to be called Camp Reynolds. It was occupied by the US Army in the nineteenth century.” She started walking toward the sign and gestured at the row of whitewashed, boarded-up buildings. “That was called Officers’ Row. I guess they had a lot of officers. They used to have barracks for the ordinary soldiers across the field, but they were torn down in the 1930s.”

“Did they give you a guided tour when you landed here or something?”

“No. But there isn’t much to do here, you know. During the week, I spend a lot of time walking around and reading the signs.”

They turned right at the end of the gravel road, where a sloping path led downhill past Officers’ Row toward the bay. Reese glanced at Amber as they walked toward the water. “I thought you’d have stuff to do. Like, I don’t know, some high-tech spacey stuff or something.”

Amber’s eyebrows rose. “No. Hirin Sagal deals with some stuff like that. I haven’t been trained in that area, so I try to keep out of his way.”

“What does everybody else do?” Reese asked, curiosity pushing aside some of her defensiveness. “I’ve only seen a few of you—where is everybody?”

“Akiya Deyir is working on setting up the United Nations stuff. He has several assistants helping him, and they’re always having conference calls with other nations. My mother and the others from Project Plato are putting together their research. They’re going to release that at the UN, too, and a lot of it has to be translated into, well, human terms. Sometimes I help them figure out how to say things, since I grew up here. I guess I act sort of as a cultural translator.”

They had reached the end of the gravel path, and as Amber stepped onto the grass to continue toward the bay, Reese glanced back at the ship. On top of the triangular tip of the craft, a line of seagulls were perched, white feathers stark against the black ship.

“There’s a little beach out here,” Amber said. “It’s nice. We can sit on the wall.”

Reese was still staring at the gulls. “I never see birds in the city anymore, but I always see them when I come here.”

“That’s probably because we don’t kill them.”

Amber’s words were disconcerting. Reese turned to look at her. She was waiting near the edge of the grass that overlooked the strip of sand, her face expectant. “You want to sit?” The ghost of a grin crossed her face. “At least it’s warm today.”

Reese remembered the last time—the only time—she had gone to a beach with Amber: the cold, brisk wind at Ocean Beach ruffling over the two of them as they lay on a blanket in the shelter of a sand dune. Reese was unexpectedly flustered, and she shoved her hands into her pockets as she stepped onto the grass. “So what else do you do here besides explain the weird customs of my people?” Reese asked. “How much time do you spend e-mailing my best friend?”

The smile on Amber’s face faltered. “He told you.”

“Of course he told me. He’s my best friend.”

Amber lowered herself onto the edge of the wall and gazed out at the bay. It was warm but overcast, and in the distance Reese saw a container ship moving slowly across the water. She began to think that Amber was never going to answer when she finally spoke.

“I only wanted to find out how you were feeling,” Amber said. “Whether you were going to call us with the phone I gave you.”

Reese sat down a couple of feet away from her. The wall was rough beneath her hands. “How did you get his e-mail address?”

“He works at that Bin 42 site. It’s public info.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me directly?”

Amber’s face reddened, but she didn’t look at Reese. “You were so mad at me. I didn’t think you’d want to talk to me. Maybe I shouldn’t have e-mailed him, but I didn’t know what else to do. I had to—” Her voice broke. She took a quick breath. “I had to do it. I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again.”

“You could see me here every week. You told me the day of the press conference that we were going to have to see each other, but I haven’t seen you since then. You thought e-mailing Julian would be a better idea?”

Amber turned on her, gray eyes fierce. “When I saw you at the press conference you said we couldn’t be