The day Teresa finally broke began like most days now. With a nightmare.
She had been awake until the small hours of the morning, watching old movies and entertainment feeds that she’d seen before. Trying to squeeze comfort out of them because they were familiar. Knowing what was going to happen before it happened made the stories feel very safe. Not at all like her real life. She stayed awake as long as her body would let her. And when she could stay awake not one moment longer, the dreams came for her all at once, like they’d been waiting for her. Like they were hungry.
There were three main varieties. In the first, she was in a strange part of the State Building, and her father—or sometimes her mother—was in a room nearby being killed, and she could stop it if she found the right doorway. In another, the planet Laconia had gotten a disease of some kind and bits of the land had started falling down deep into the burning core. Nothing was stable and nothing was safe. The third was formless and violent, less a dream than variations on Ilich’s murder of Timothy.
Each version came regularly enough that she’d begun to recognize them. The dreams had even started commenting on it. As some new terror reared its head, she’d think It’s just like in my dreams, only now it’s really happening. It made the nightmares worse because it made them feel inevitable. Her waking hours were poisoned by them. The violence and fear and loss could spill out at any moment, from any place, and nothing could be relied upon.
It was terrible because it was true.
She woke after not enough sleep to the gentle tapping of a servant and Muskrat’s excited bark. Breakfast was a favorite meal for the old dog. Maybe every meal was.
The servant brought in a white ceramic tray with a plate of eggs and sweet rice, a glass of watermelon juice, and a sausage with the dark, grainy mustard that she liked. Or that she had liked. Food wasn’t something that interested her now. Not the way it used to. She stirred the sweet rice and watched the official newsfeeds talking breathlessly about the Laconian ships offering assistance to local governments in the ongoing fight against separatist violence. Images of men and women in Laconian formal blues talking seriously with the governors of Earth and Mars. She wondered if anyone believed that. She wondered whether she had.
She knew that if she didn’t eat, her failure would be reported to Trejo. It had happened before. She took a bite of egg, but the rubbery texture of the white made her gag. The rice would be enough. It had to be. She hadn’t been able to get more than half of her dinner down the night before. She knew that starving wasn’t good for her, and that Ilich and Trejo wouldn’t like it. That was part of why she did it. She took a spoonful of the rice, sucked away the thick, sweet sauce, and spat out the grains. On her screen, Admiral Gujarat was talking about the completion of the Whirlwind, the newest Magnetar-class ship, as if it weren’t the only one. As if the first two weren’t already dead.
She picked the sausage up. The smell of grease and salt was repulsive. She couldn’t see it as anything but a slurry of dead animals in a thin membrane. She tossed it to Muskrat. Instead of wolfing it down, her dog looked from the scrap to her and back again and whined.
“You might as well,” Teresa said. “I wasn’t going to eat it before. I’m certainly not going to now.”
Muskrat swung her wide tail twice, uncertainly. She ate the sausage with something that looked like shame. Teresa’s numbness slid away for a moment, and tears came to her eyes. The State Building was filled with people from every system in the empire. She had people whose only duty was to cook her food, to educate her, to see that her clothes were cleaned and put away. Nobody had the job of actually caring about her. The only one who even noticed her was a dog.
A voice spoke in the back of her head, as clear as if there had been someone in the room. It sounded like her own, but calmer. Drier. Somehow more adult than she thought of herself, like some later Teresa sending a stray observation back through time. Muskrat likes Holden.
The voice didn’t go on. Teresa looked down at Muskrat’s complicated brown eyes, and the sorrow lost its edge.
“You may have shitty taste in friends,” she said. “Sorry, dog.”
Another tap came at her door, and she didn’t need to open it to know it was Ilich. She stirred her food to make it look like she’d eaten more than she had and let the door open. As soon as he saw her, his smile faltered.
“I know,” she said, before he even spoke. “It’s very important that we maintain the image that everything is normal. You tell me that every day.” She stood up and put her arms out to the side. “This is normal. I’m normal!”
“Of course,” he said with a practiced smile that meant he just wasn’t going to fight her. “Your peer class is going to start soon. Dr. Okoye is going to be leading it today so that I can meet with Admiral Trejo.”
So that I can do something more important, he meant. Even if he didn’t say the words, Teresa heard them. Muskrat huffed and wagged her tail, anticipating the adventure of leaving her rooms. Teresa shrugged and walked toward the door, daring Ilich not to step aside. He stepped aside.
The State Building was the same as it had ever been. The archways, the colonnades, the gardens. Nothing about it had changed. It was her home and her kingdom. And somehow they’d made it into her cell, Ilich and all the others too. She was honored and revered and treated with total deference if she did what she was told, when she was told. Her opinion was listened to with seriousness and gravity, and then ignored. She stalked toward the lecture room, wondering what would happen if she marched in, took the microphone, and shouted My father is brain-dead and nothing is all right. It was enough to make her smile.
As it turned out, though, the fantasy wouldn’t have worked. The lecture room had been rearranged for the day—six slate-topped tables stood in rows of three. The other students—her so-called peers—were already there. Apparently Ilich had come because she’d run late and hadn’t noticed.
The room stank of something deep and caustic. Air recyclers were set up in all the windows, scrubbing whatever the volatiles were out and blowing fresh air back in. Small trays sat on each table, two each, with a variety of scalpels, tweezers, pins, and thin scissors laid out between them. Elvi Okoye was walking among the students, leaning on her cane, and chatting as she went. Teresa felt her anger shift again. She was supposed to be fixing Teresa’s father, not teaching classes to a bunch of kids. But, of course, Teresa wasn’t allowed to say that. Because that wouldn’t look normal.
“Good to see you, Teresa,” Elvi said, and touched her hand. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Teresa shrugged and moved away, leaning against one of the tables. Now that she was close, she could see the bodies spread out in the trays and held down with pins. Dead animals. Dead as Timothy. Dead as her mother. Dead as all the people in the ring space.
“So today Colonel Ilich wanted me to, um, give you all a little introduction to parallel evolution. So what we have here are two different species from two different trees of life. One of them is native to Laconia, and the other one’s from Earth. They’re both called frogs because they fill the same ecological niche and because they have some similarities in anatomy. So, yeah. Get in groups of three, I guess? And I’ll walk you through the dissections.”
Teresa looked at the frogs. They both had pale bellies and darker skin, though the one she recognized was considerably darker. The rear legs folded differently, and one had two forelimbs to the other’s four. From where she was standing, the thing they had most in common was that they were dead. She took a scalpel between her fingers, considering the blade, and wondered whether she’d be able to cut the bodies open without vomiting. The upside was she didn’t have much in her belly to puke up. So that was fine.
“Hey,” Connor said. She hadn’t seen him come up, but here he was. Sandy hair and soft eyes. She remembered caring what his opinion was. She remembered wanting to kiss him like it was in a film she’d watched, and not something she’d felt herself.