He sighed with lament. “The way I acted, I don’t blame her. I’ve never experienced pain like that before. It was . . . enlightening.”
Amanda eyed him strangely. “Enlightening?”
“Ever since it happened, I’ve been thinking about the people of the past, the way they accepted agony as just another part of their lives. With all our advancements in technology and medicine, I’m wondering if perhaps we lost something as a species. A certain fortitude.”
“No one can accuse you of weakness, David. You’re one of the strongest people I’ve ever known.”
“Well, I appreciate you saying that.” He cracked a dour smirk. “If Nietzsche’s right about the things that don’t kill us, then Zack’s really going to be afraid of me soon.”
Amanda felt a hot stab of anguish at the mention of Zack. She clenched her jaw and kept working.
“He’s not afraid of you,” she uttered.
“Then why did he call me a psychopath?”
“For the same reason you called me stupid, okay? He was upset. If you had stayed in the kitchen ten more seconds, he would have apologized.”
David eyed her with sharp surprise. He’d noticed her tension from the moment she entered the room. Now the woman who’d handled him so calmly yesterday seemed to be coming unglued.
“Amanda, I’m sorry for the way I behaved yesterday. I really am.”
“That’s not why I’m . . .” Her eyes darted back and forth in quandary. “Can I pick your brain about something? In absolute confidence.”
“Of course. What about?”
“Esis.”
His sandy eyebrows rose in intrigue. “Wow. Okay. I mean I’m not sure how much insight I can give you. I only met her once.”
“Well, you’re the only other person I know who’s spoken to her. She . . .”
Amanda fought to explain her conundrum. All throughout her sleepless day, she’d replayed her back-alley encounter with Esis, reconstructing it word by word. By sundown, she’d pieced together the woman’s full warning. Do not entwine with the funny artist. I grow tired of telling you this. You entwine with your own, you won’t be a flower. You’ll just be dirt.
David listened to the story with abject fascination, stroking his chin with the arched brow of a sleuth.
“Wow. That’s . . . huh. At the risk of embarrassing you, it seems fairly obvious who she was referring to, and what she meant by ‘entwine.’”
Amanda nodded brusquely. “Yes. I know that. But how did she even . . . I mean . . .”
“How did she know that you and Zack would become intimate?”
She flinched in discomfort. “We haven’t. Not yet. But she gave me that warning before I even met him.”
“Well, clearly Esis is an augur of some sort. It’s not like we don’t know any.”
“But why would she care who I . . . entwine with?”
The boy gazed ahead in deep rumination. He started and stopped himself twice before speaking.
“She did say something odd to us, me and my father. He was with me when she gave me my bracelet. She just popped into our living room through a glowing white portal in the wall. Now that I think about it, I wonder if it’s the same temporal mechanism that Mia uses for her notes.”
Amanda wound her finger impatiently. “What did she say?”
“She told us the world was ending in minutes, that I was moving on and my father wasn’t. Had the portal not lent her a certain latitude for wild assertions, we might have dismissed her as a lunatic. But my father certainly listened. The whole thing made him rather . . . Well, if you knew him, you’d know how rarely he shows emotion. But at that moment, he was overcome.”
David pressed his knuckles to his lips, his face marred with twitchy grief.
“I half expected him to plead for his life, so he could continue the work that was so important to him. But to my surprise, his one pressing question to Esis was ‘Will my son be all right?’”
Amanda held his arm. She could understand now how David had become so resilient. The poor boy had practically been raising himself since he was ten.
“Anyway, Esis was sympathetic,” he said. “She assured my father that I’d be in good health and excellent company. I remember her exact words on this. She said, ‘He’ll only be alone for a short while. Then he’ll be joined with his brothers and sisters.’”
The floor of Amanda’s stomach dropped. The room suddenly felt three times smaller.
David shrugged pensively. “I’d always assumed Esis was being figurative. But now—”
“That’s not it,” Amanda stammered. “That’s crazy. I know who I come from.”
“And I know who I come from. I’ve seen the video of my birth. Doesn’t rule out the possibility that our mothers were surrogates.”
“How can you even say that?”
“I’m just exploring the options, Amanda. We know the Pelletiers existed on our world. We know they chose us. We just don’t know when. Maybe they had an active role in our creation, forging us all from the same genetic template. If that doesn’t describe siblings, what does?”