“I’m sorry,” he said a short time later, earthbound again.
“You should be.”
“They told me. I didn’t know it was a thing for you.”
“A thing for me? How could you not know? Oh yeah, because you’ve been gone for six years.”
“You never said anything about it. Not on the phone or in messages.”
“I didn’t want to bother you. You had enough to worry about.”
“But then how can you blame me for not knowing?”
“Because you should have just known. Even if I never said a word. You know how hard school was for me without a Pilot. You remember how tense things were when Mom started talking about getting hers.” That had been only two years after he had gotten his, before he left. “You’ve never even liked it all that much, yourself. You’ve said so. So why sell it for them? They don’t need help.”
He put his face in his hands. His Pilot gleamed above his ear.
“Soph, I’m sorry. It’s . . . I’ve been thinking of getting out for over a year, but I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. Then Balkenhol called me out of the blue looking for spokespeople who had used their Pilots to achieve excellence in their fields, and I was already on their list from that ad the Army had me do. How could I say no?”
Sophie put a hand on his back. “You would have found a job eventually. You could have said no.”
“Or I could have cost more people their lives like—you don’t understand how done I was with being there.” He looked her full on for the first time in the conversation. “I have to do this, Soph, but maybe they’ll let me talk about how it really is. Maybe they’ll let me say it saved me and my unit a hundred times over, but I hate the noise.”
Sophie doubted it, but kept her mouth shut.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
JULIE
Julie wished there could have been one night without drama. Sophie stood so quickly she knocked her plate to the floor. She didn’t stop to pick it up when it broke.
“What was that about?” David asked after the door slammed. “Should I go after her?”
Julie went to grab paper towels for the ice cream and crumbs, leaving Val to answer. “She’ll be okay. I don’t think she’ll go far without her bag. Your sister has become very involved in the anti-Pilot movement. You know there’s an anti-Pilot movement, right?”
“Yes, but I don’t know anything about it.”
Julie listened as she cleaned, curious how Val would characterize Sophie’s group. “They think it’s been adopted too fast. It’s leaving people behind, and they say there’s negative data being suppressed, and BNL is lying to the government, and the government is lying to the parents, and the schools are going along for the ride because it helps their numbers.”
“That’s a lot of lying,” David said. “Do you think it’s true?”
Val raised her palms. “I think there’s probably some lying going on somewhere in there. You know me: I wasn’t a fan of the idea to begin with.”
“What about you, Mom?” David asked.
Julie stood, plate shards in one hand, dirty towel clutched in the other. “My Pilot has never been anything but helpful, so it’s hard to see the downside. Like yours.”
David got to his feet. “I’m going to go find Sophie.”
After the door had closed on David as well, Julie went into the kitchen to throw the plate shards in the trash. Val came up behind and held her.
“I can’t believe he’s back for good. He really did say that, right? I’m not dreaming?”
“He said it,” Julie confirmed, tossing the rag in the sink and turning into her wife’s embrace. “No more checking body counts online. For us, anyway.”
“Do you think he’s planning on living here?”
“No idea. I would think he’s got the money to get a place of his own, but I’m not going to push him if he hasn’t thought about it yet. He can stay as long as he needs, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Me, too.” Val pulled away to load the dishwasher. “But if he still eats the same way, we should probably ask him to chip in for groceries.”
Julie laughed. “And we may have to dig some trenches if those two partisans are both under one roof.”
“I don’t think David’s all that partisan, Jules. It sounds like it’s just a job for him. Hopefully he can get on his feet and then move on to something that’ll cause less family friction.”
Val disappeared into the bathroom and Julie walked through the house, turning off lights. She left the door unlocked in case neither kid had taken keys. Half an hour later, already in bed, she heard the door creak and two whispering voices and footsteps and two closing bedroom doors, and all was right in the world, if only for a night. She closed her eyes and waited for her Pilot to cycle down to sleep.
• • •
Even in a morning mall, populated only by strolling seniors and Piloted guards, Julie noticed the changes in David. He walked with a tension that went beyond military bearing, like a drawn bow. He stayed close to the wall on one side. She followed the movement of his head and eyes from the corner of her own eye; Pilot watching Pilot. His eyes darted to the rooftops, to each passing shopper, to the storefronts, to the kiosks and planters and garbage cans. He clenched and unclenched his fists, touching his sides occasionally.
“You okay, Davey?”
“Fine,” he said. The hairs on the back of his neck began to curl with sweat.
“What are you looking at?”
He shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”
“Try me.”
He stopped, so she did, too. He looked her full in the eyes. Adult to adult. Then
