Kelley Eskridge Read Free Page B

began
to pant, but she didn't let go of her daughter until there were two
other adults there to help lift her the rest of the way.
    Surgery restored most of the function of
the hand, after endless weeks of physiotherapy and a confining
rehabilitative brace that made Donatella clumsy and bitter. Ren knew
that she was to blame for her mother's pain, because she hadn't obeyed.
And maybe it was her fault that Terry had fallen. She wasn't sure: no
one had told her. But she knew that she had failed in responsibility.
    She decided that she must make sure to
never, never forget what she had done. She crept out to the garden and
found the largest stone that she could hold with one hand, a beautiful
ragged thing of gray and brown. It was a day like a painting: a hundred
shades of green in the leaves and grasses and lily pads of the pond, in
the vegetable tops waving from the brown grit of the soil; the sky that
looked as if one of the blue colorsticks in her classroom had melted
across it; the pinks and lavenders and sun-yellows of the flowers whose
names she didn't know, that nodded wild and rangy on their thin stalks
because her father liked them that way. The pain, when it came, was
sharp and orange. She managed to hit her left hand twice before Carlos
found her.
    “Oh, Ren,” he said, after he'd made her an
ice pack and wiped her tears. “Don't hurt yourself. That won't help.
The only thing that helps is to do better next time.”
    She waited for him to tell her how, but he
only hugged her and said, “Okay?”
    She wasn't sure, but she wanted to please
him, so she told him, “I'll do better.”

2
    SOMEHOW LIFE WENT ON IN THE BAD
DAYS AFTER HAL loween. Jackal hung on to her secret. Sometimes
it felt like a soft animal biting the lining of her stomach, wanting
out. At odd moments, a frightened voice in her head would whisper They're looking at me funny. Did I say something
wrong? Do they know ?
    She only had to stay sharp, stay frosty, a
little longer. The end-of-year holidays were less than a month away,
with the investiture looming behind them, and she saw it as a talisman
of sorts: she would be off the island, just another Hope doing Hope
things, and it would not be so hard to lie to strangers.
    This morning she rode her bicycle from her
apartment to the center of Ko. It was a typical early-December day, the
blue sky gathering clouds at the horizon, the sun warm on her back as
she pedaled. Her route traveled the Ring Highway along the coast toward
the south junction, where Fortaleza Road ran north and west into the
center of the island and the Ko Prime corporate campus. Although the
South China Sea lolled along a reef, salty and shallow, only fifty
meters to her left, it was the greenland to her right that she noticed.
The hundreds of acres on this part of the island would probably not be
developed for decades; the company liked to plan for growth, to marshal
its resources early. This wild-ness was safe for years, perhaps for her
whole lifetime, and there was no risk in letting herself believe that
these trees belonged to her; the rough trunks, the startling soft meat
of a broken branch, the knobbled twigs rising in rows like choirs. The
ground belonged to her, the human-made rises and falls of root and
rock, carefully random, beautiful. The flowers were hers, stuporous in
their mulch: the light and the stippled shadow, the stones and the rich
rot underneath them, were all part of this place that felt like part of
her. For the few minutes of passing through it, she was drawn into it
like a breath.
    Ahead, the treeline thinned and Fortaleza
Road pulled away from the coastline into a neighbourhood of houses that
muscled their way out of the rock, built with open spaces and expanses
of E-glass to take full advantage of wind and solar energy. Beyond them
rose clusters of angled apartment buildings, grouped around common
sports and shopping areas—vertical communities, every bit as
comfortable and modern as the executive homes.