“No. But I’m going to remember … ”
I’ll bet she is. And I don’t even know what happened while she was Underneath. “Sam, we’re almost there. Hold on … ”
I aim for the open port door. I can see the other ports snapping shut one by one around the sides. And as soon as we glide in, our door closes, too. I hear the vacuum of the airlock. I jump off the bike, get Sam’s face in my hands, make her gaze focus on me.
“Stay here. For just a few more minutes. Stay right here. And then we’re going to go somewhere and let them come. And then they can heal. Okay?”
“You’ll stay with me?” she whispers.
I kiss her mouth one time, and then the interior door slides open and the room is full of people, and I’m pulled into my dad’s hug.
“The ship is ours,” he says. “Faye is relieved. What’s going—”
“You heard what I said, right? Three days of quarantine … ”
And then Mom has me. She’s little, but no less forceful, and I get both my cheeks kissed and then a smack.
“You moved forward without supervision? What was your training for, Beckett?”
There are other people milling about—Roger, Dr. Kataria, the tech crew, Lanik—and Samara’s about to fall off the bike. I pull away from Mom, get Sam off the bike, put an arm around her waist and behind her knees and scoop her up. Which seemed like the right and slightly dramatic thing to do, until I remember that Sam is almost as tall as I am.
“Is she sick?” says Lanik, coming to look her over.
“Not like that,” I tell him. I’m already pushing awkwardly through the small crowd. “Sam,” I whisper, “stay here. Don’t go yet … ”
Mom says, “She’s from the visuals,” and Dad changes gears.
“Where are we heading?” he asks. “Medical center?”
“My room.”
They don’t ask any more questions. Not yet. But it’s a long way to our quarters, with her head bobbing against my neck, and when the door to my room slides open, it almost doesn’t seem familiar. Like looking at somebody else’s stuff. I kind of wish I’d cleaned it. But I don’t think Sam is seeing what’s around her. I set her on the edge of the bed and she’s gone. Somewhere else. Mom and Dad are hovering in the doorway, trying to figure out where this is going. It’s really good to see them.
“Sam’s dealing with her memories,” I tell them. “It’s going to take a while, and … she’s probably going to scream a lot. She’s … There have been some terrible things.”
Mom says, “Shouldn’t she have Kataria?”
“Kataria is not going to be familiar.”
“And you are?” Dad asks.
“Yes.”
He keeps his skepticism to himself, which is appreciated. “She just lost both her parents. And I said I would stay with her.”
And since she starts up right then, they leave me to it. For a day and a half.
Though there’s time to talk to Mom and Dad in between. While Sam is sleeping. They’ve seen the visuals Faye uploaded from the glasses, but there’s a lot to fill in. And to tell me. About the first attempt to disable the Centauri’s thrust, so it couldn’t launch, and how the needless destruction and rounding up of the locals had convinced enough of the crew to change the leadership as soon as Faye left the ship. A military captain, Davis, is in charge now. Jill and Vesta are confined to quarters, like all of Faye’s supporters.
But mostly I let Sam work through her memories. And her grief. I held her. Stroked her hair. Slept beside her, in case she needed me. She did. But even with this new crop of experiences, now that the first one or two relivings are over, she’s been relaxed, more than I’ve ever seen her. In control. And she’s telling me things without going away. About Reddix, and her mother right before Judgment. About Knowing and amrita. How her mind showed her immunity.
“I could go to any memory I wanted while I was asleep,” she says. She’s curled up sideways on my bed, using the wall as a backrest, wearing a pair of my jogging shorts and a T-shirt. Except for the scars on her arms, she really could be from Texas. I can’t stop looking at her.
“So which ones did you choose?”
“Swinging on Adam’s rope. Talking to Nita … ”
I’m amazed that she can say this without the memory of Nita trying to pull her away.
“Jumping off the fern roots,” she goes on. “In my bedchamber. On the rug.”
“Really?” And then a new thought jumps into my head. “Wait a second. How many times did you go to that memory?”
She’s got the blanket between two fingers. Feeling what it’s made of. Giving it a shy, slightly sly grin. “Possibly … ninety-four.”
“You’re telling me that you’ve kissed me, like that, ninety-four more times than I’ve kissed you? That is completely unfair.” She raises her amber eyes.
“Do you need another memory?”
I decide that I do. All the way until Mom and Dad come back from meeting with the new captain.
“Day after tomorrow a team is going out to the old city,” Dad says when I come into the common area. “To find what they find and see what they see. It won’t be good, probably.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Son, are you sure you’re not”—he glances at the door to my room, speaks more quietly—“in over your head? Do you need Kataria?”
“Not at all.”
I don’t know what he sees in my face, probably guilt, because he just shakes his head and says, “Oh, boy. Right. You know your mother is not going to like that.”
Mom has not been a fan of Samara in my room. Even with the door open.
“What are the preferred burial practices?” Dad asks.
“Burning. But let me check with … ”
Then Dad sits up, because Samara is in the doorway. In my shorts and T-shirt. It’s the first time she’s emerged.
“Hi,” she says.
Dad jumps up. I’m not sure he was ready for how pretty Sam is. When she’s not screaming. “Sam,” he says. “Or Samara? Which do you prefer?”
“Sam.”
“Good. Call me Sean. We’re—”
“Joanna Cho-Rodriguez,” says Mom, coming in from food prep. “We are happy to have you.”
This is a little stiff. But Sam just smiles and says, “Xièxiè nǐ yāoqǐng wǒ zhu nǐ jiā.”
I watch Mom’s eyebrows disappear into her fringe of dark hair. “She speaks Chinese? Come,” she says, taking Sam’s hand and pulling her out of the room. “You have to eat with us. When did you last eat?” And I know by Mom’s reaction that Sam must have said something like three or four days. And then I’m hearing Mom offer basically every scrap of food we have in there. In Chinese.
Dad looks me over. “Son, I call that playing dirty.”
“I call it playing smart. What would you have done?”
He shrugs.
“Anyway, it only took about five seconds. She’ll be having conversations with her before we finish dinner.”
“About that,” says Dad. “This brain power, it’s artificially created?”
“Yes. Sam wants to let it go, now that she knows how. The suicide rate Underneath is … well, it’s unbelievable. And for good reason.”