“But you know it’s wrong.” Javier rested his hands on her shoulders. She really was so little. Too little. Too little for this job, anyway. “Because when your mother made you, she didn’t include the failsafe.”
Anza collapsed against him. She cried into his chest. “I’m supposed to be protecting him! I know it! It’s the only reason Mom would have made me! But I… I…”
“But you can’t protect him from the thing he wants most,” Javier said, stroking her hair.
Anza pushed herself away from him a little. She looked at him from the corner of her eye. “Now that you’ve dropped in, are you just going to leave? Everyone says you leave.”
He lifted his brows. "Everyone?"
"You know," she said. "My brothers."
"I'm sorry, sweetheart, but they're... gone," Javier said. "The ones from the island, at least. The others, the ones Matteo and Ricci never found, I don't know about them. Maybe they're out there, somewhere. I hope so, anyway."
Anza shook her head. "If I'm alive and so is Xavier, and so are you, then why would our brothers be gone? Don't you think Mom would have saved them, too?"
He smiled ruefully. "Of course I do. I just don't know if she had the time."
Anza peered up at him. "It was scary, wasn't it?"
His eyes welled up, and he felt the moisture start to crystallize. His body lacked the organic heat necessary to turn them into real tears in this cold. He blinked them away and nodded. "Yeah. It was scary." He leaned down. “But I didn’t cross the Gulf of Mexico, ride through the American Southwest, and cross the Pacific Ocean just to drop in,” he said. “I’m here to help you clean house.”
“When I said the words clean house,” Javier said, surveying the chaos, “I was not speaking literally.”
Xavier had achieved one of his dreams. The kids lived in a treehouse of sorts. Really, it was the living wall module of a condominium complex in town, but they did all of the gardening, and they lived surrounded by vines and leaves and gurgling water. And kipple, apparently. Lots and lots of kipple. Clothes, toys, takeaway containers, juice pouches, makeup, even what looked to be old bicycle parts and tools – they were all on the floor, in no particular order.
“It wasn’t like this, this morning,” Anza said.
“Oh, I’ve never heard that one, before.”
“No, really!” There was panic in her voice. When Javier looked at her, her eyes were wide. “Xavier isn’t here. And he wouldn’t leave it like this! I’m the messy one!”
Javier bent to look her in the eye. “So what are you saying? That someone else came here, and flipped your crashpad? Why? What would they be looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Anza said. “We don’t really have anything valuable. We don’t make that much money, and Xavier didn’t really keep much from the island…”
The island.
Amy.
“What did he keep?” Javier asked. “What was left to keep?”
“I don’t really know,” Anza said. “I wasn’t born yet. I didn’t iterate until he’d already gotten here. Xavier says one minute he was in his treehouse, and the next minute he was underground, in a sort of submersible. When he washed up here, I budded out of the sub.”
Maybe that was part of the island’s defence system, too. Find all the kids and put them underwater, where they could drift off undetected. If that was the case, then little bits of the island were still running around. Maybe he had even more daughters than he knew. But if he did, Powell wasn’t concentrating on them. For some reason, he wanted Xavier. Or something Xavier had.
“What else did Xavier take with him?”
“Well, there were his clothes. And he had some games, and some old books our brothers gave him. Oh, and there was a branch from the tree.” Anza blinked, when he remained silent. “The diamond tree?”
The diamond tree. The one that had sat outside their house. His son’s favourite climbing tree. The first thing Amy had raised from the water, after raising herself. He thought back to the footage Holberton had shown him in the hotel room at the Akiba. His son, in the diamond tree, trying as hard as he could to break something away from it.
“Is it here?” Javier asked.
Anza looked around. “No…” She began picking things up and putting them down. Her movements grew increasingly stiff as she did so. “No. It isn’t.”
Javier helped her look, anyway. It was a small space, and together they pushed the clutter to the walls and corners of it without much trouble. Beneath the pile was a drawing on the floor. It was of a tower.
“BRING THE STONE,” said a note beneath it, in greasepaint.
“That’s Mitch’s handwriting,” Anza said. “Does that mean…?”
“He has your brother. And he wants that diamond.” He gave her a careful glance. “Are you holding out on me, here? Do you know where it could be?”
Anza cast him a look of complete adolescent indignation. “Of course not! If I knew, I’d be on my way by now! Besides, it's been missing for days. Xavier's been looking around for it everywhere.”