The pieces fell into place. “So this is about Rikki.”
“Of course”—his voice cracked—“it’s about Rikki. Pretty much the first thing I knew about her, back on the cruise where we met, was how eager she was to get home. How much she had missed her family while she’d been away at grad school. It was real closeness, too, not part of some sitcom. And yet more amazing, soon enough they weren’t her family, but our family.
“So here you and I are: loners. Carlos, it embarrasses me to admit, is much as I once was, if not as smooth. Antonio is, well, you know.”
“I know,” Dana said. And a dear, regardless, in his own way.
“Li, though…I can’t read her.”
“Me, either.” At the end, Hawthorne had had only hours to round out the crew for this mission. Li’s file, and Carlos’s for that matter, was a short dump from the public record, little more than a résumé. “I’d bet that shrinks learn to mask their feelings.” And politicians, too, only Li had never, to Dana’s knowledge, volunteered to anyone here that facet of her past.
“Heads up.” Blake’s voice changed tone. “Radar shows a high mountain range.”
“Yeah, I see it, but thanks. We’ll have almost a klick of clearance. “You left out Rikki.”
“She’s not like you or me or any of the rest of us. She is a people person. I remember what happened back home. I do think occasionally about everyone we left behind. When it happens, I’m sad, but then I get over it.
“But Rikki? She grieves, still. For her family most of all.
“That she can’t continue her family? And the rejection by the kids here? It’s killing her, Dana.”
At the catch in Blake’s voice, Dana glanced away from the console. He was trembling.
In an anguished tone, not much above a whisper, he said, “I don’t know how to fix this.”
Dana didn’t know how to fix him. “It’s been years since you learned Rikki can’t safely get pregnant. She still hasn’t come to terms with it?”
“Worse.” Blake hesitated. “If Li gave her blessing today, I think Rikki would be afraid to try. I think she’s lost faith in herself as a parent.”
“That’s…ridiculous.” Only Dana felt that inadequacy, too. More and more, whenever she swung by the childcare center. With sixty-four more children almost to term.
She hadn’t admitted those feelings—failings—to anyone, either. She didn’t know that she could.
For the remainder of the flight, she and Blake were both quiet.
*
Wearing a big, welcoming smile, Dana closed the distance to the children’s white picket fence. From afar you couldn’t tell that the pickets were poured concrete, not fashioned from wood. From afar, you didn’t see that the pickets stood two meters tall.
Drawing near, seeing the children through the pickets, the fence looked like a stockade.
“Kids grow,” Li had said. “We don’t want to rebuild the fence every couple years.” It sounded reasonable. Most everything she said sounded reasonable.
The day was sunny and crisp. Perfect football weather Blake had declared it when they landed. But this being Dark, the few hints of fall colors came from inside the greenhouse and on saplings in clay planters glimpsed through the fence.
Dana flashed a hand signal. On a pole just inside the gate a camera bobbed: Marvin acknowledging that he had seen her. As she approached the gate, at which the handprint-reader lamp flashed ready, Li opened the gate from inside.
“Hi,” Li said. “Did you have a good flight?”
“It had its ups and downs.”
Dana slipped inside, the gate falling locked and shut behind her with a loud click. It must have rained while she and Blake were off flying, because the green carpet squished beneath her boots. Kids should play on grass, she thought sadly, although no one could spare the time to keep such a large expanse mowed, or to haul and spread the truckloads of river-delta silt a lawn would have required. Had there been time, no one would have permitted children around the quantities of fertilizer the lifeless silt would have needed applied several times each year.
Children clambered over the playground equipment. Younger kids with shovels and pails dug in sandboxes. Dark lacked soil, but it had plenty of sand. As she had sensed from the distance, several of the bigger kids were in the tiny garden plot. Picking tomatoes, apparently. All the boys and girls wore pants and sweaters, dressed alike except for color. Red for the oldest, blue for the cohort a year younger, green for those a year younger still.
Like uniforms. Why had she never noticed that?
The yard, for all the dozens of little ones, was quiet and orderly; the expressions on so many of the young faces seemed purposeful rather than playful. But on what basis could she form expectations? Only ancient memories of her own childhood.
Dana walked to the garden. She leaned forward, hand outstretched to tousle Eve’s hair.
Eve scuttled away, circling behind a row of potted tomato plants, to shelter behind Li.
“Excuse me, Eve,” Dana said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Tell Ms. Dana you’re sorry,” Li directed.
“No need,” Dana said hastily. “Honey, how are you doing? Are you enjoying the nice weather?”
Eve buried her face in Li’s back. “I’m sorry, Ms. Dana,” she mumbled.
Her brothers (for lack of a more fitting term), had sidled close together.
“How are you big boys today?” Dana asked.
“Fine, Ms. Dana,” Castor said. Pollux, his lower lip trembling, held out a tomato.
“Run along,” Li told them. “Take inside what you’ve picked, and then see if Mr. Carlos could use your help.”
Pails swinging at their sides, the three scampered toward the childcare center.
“What was that about?” Dana asked Li.
“What do you mean?”
Around the sandboxes most of the children had stopped their play. Several stared, wide-eyed, at Dana. She said, “Look at them.”
“Kids watch adults. That’s part of how they learn. They don’t see you often, is all.”
Only to Dana these children looked wary, not curious. “And Eve? I would swear she was
