Neptune's Tears (12 page)

Zee was aware of swimming up through warm, heavy rivers of sleep. But each time she neared the surface she dived back down. Once the darkness turned rosy against her eyelids
and she knew it was daylight, and knew that someone had set her windows for natural light. She just had time to wonder who before she dived again, just for a few minutes, she told herself. When she
swam up once more, the rosiness was gone. It was evening, and this time she kept going until she broke the surface.

The last of the day’s light came through the window high on her bedroom wall and from the small sitting room walls turned down low. She got up and stood in the doorway.

‘David?’

He was sitting on her sofa. It seemed right that he was there, but she wasn’t sure why.

For a moment neither of them spoke. Then he crossed the room and put his arms around her. ‘I’m so sorry, Zee. I should never have let you walk away like that.’

She noticed she was wearing scrub bottoms and an oversized T-shirt that said
Royal London Lacrosse
, clothes she usually slept in. ‘Where are my real clothes? You . . . I . . . we
didn’t . . . ?’

‘No. Mia and Rani got you cleaned up and changed into those.
Before
Rani snuck me in. She’s quite the watchdog where you’re concerned.’

Zee began to remember small bits and flashes, but was having trouble piecing them together. ‘The beautiful girl. Mia? You asked me to trust her and she helped us. She brought us here,
right?’

‘According to her, you made a fantastic drunk.’

‘Who is she?’

‘My research partner.’

‘Who is she besides that? I’ve seen her places we’re at, like that day at Brighton, and you always know she’s there but never introduce us. What’s going
on?’

He ignored her question. ‘And your friend Rani could be an actress. Mia said she came out into the lobby to get you and gave you the lecture of a lifetime, to make sure everyone would hear
about it and leave you alone with your hangover for a few days. She brought some food, too. You should probably try to eat. You lost some blood and I had to give you something to help you
sleep.’ Zee heard and felt again the sickening scrape of blade against bone. Cautiously, she touched her collarbone with her fingertips, then traced a line up her throat to her jaw. The skin
was smooth and unbroken.

‘I don’t understand. The man with the knife . . . I’m sure he stabbed me. And you too. I can’t have imagined it, there was blood all over your shirt.’

David took her hand and slid it inside his shirt, her palm against his midriff. ‘He did stab me. Right about here. Feel it?’

‘No.’ Zee felt nothing but smooth skin and muscle. No dressing, no wound. ‘How did you do this?’

He held up a small silver bar. Zee recognised it at once – it was just like the bar she thought she’d seen David put in his pocket the night they met in the emergency treatment
room.

‘An accelerator. It identifies damaged cells and kicks their repair rate into hyperdrive. The cells along your collar bone,’ he explained, ‘will always be a few weeks ahead of
the rest in the ageing process. You may get a wrinkle there first. Or, when you’re a very, very old woman with dozens of descendants, there may be a slight discolouration or the hint of a
sag.’

His fingers moved from her collarbone to her throat and continued until they were buried in her hair. He drew her close and she instinctively mirrored his movement, reaching up to twine her arms
around his neck. She had to stand on her toes to do it, and felt the softness of her body unfold against his hard-muscled one. His dark hair, tousled over his forehead, was cut short at the back
and trimmed close around his ears. She loved the way his skin went from rough to satiny, rough on his cheekbones and jaw, because he hadn’t shaved, satiny on the back of his neck and
earlobes.

For the first time, she realised he had a scar behind his left ear, a small, smooth circle no larger than a shirt button. As scars went it was perfect, which was strange because scars were
usually anything but perfect. Jagged, ridged, ugly, angry, that was the world of scars. This one seemed almost deliberate, a wound made with artistry in mind.

‘David, what’s this?’ Her fingertip rested lightly on the spot.

‘That’s something I need to tell you about, Zee.’

He paced back to the couch, drawing her with him. His grey eyes, usually flecked with shards of amber, were clouded.

‘What’s wrong?’ She touched his cheek and the force of his thoughts nearly burned her palm.

‘Everything. Everything I’ve done is wrong. I never meant to care so much for you, Zee. But that first night, in the emergency treatment room, I thought you were from Omura because
we have so many redheads, and there’re hardly any here. And even after I realised you weren’t from Omura, you seemed like you were already part of me. There was something about your
gestures, the way you moved and held yourself. It was like recognising someone I cared for and hadn’t seen for a long time.

‘Seeing you even once was wrong – and dangerous – and I knew I couldn’t let it happen again. I made a deal with myself, that I could still see you without letting you
know. Sort of keep track. Then there was the first shock bomb and all I could think about was you and if you were safe. I wasn’t all that far from the blast. It was easy enough to find
someone who needed to be checked out at a hospital. And easy enough to convince myself I was just being a good Samaritan. But it was about you, Zee. To make sure you were safe. It’s always
been about you.’

She smiled softly. ‘I don’t have a problem with that.’

‘But Omura does. Remember when I told you that our extreme efficiency has made most people opt out of having children and that our population is declining? It’s a little more drastic
than that. We no longer have enough people to sustain our civilisation. Not enough workers to get everything done. Not enough young people to support the elderly who can no longer work. About a
generation ago, there started to be food riots, and shortages of basic goods. The price of everything had shot up. There’s a twenty-five-year waiting list for a house. A few decades years
ago, forecasting models showed that our civilisation was grinding to a complete halt, and we would die out sometime within the next two hundred years. The Central Governing Authority passed the
Emergency Repopulation Act. It’s perfectly democratic. Every citizen, no matter who, must marry and begin the reproductive process no later than their twenty-first birthday. I’ve had
unusual freedom doing this work, but my twentieth birthday’s coming up. That’s when my name and bio goes public on the government’s Find-a-Mate service.’

‘What if you don’t? Find a mate?’

‘The government finds one for you. No one gets to be twenty-one without being married.’ David paused. ‘Even if it weren’t for that, Omura doesn’t allow anyone to
stay on assignment longer than two years. The risk of “inappropriate attachments to the outlier species” is too great. Well, they were certainly right about that.’

The thought of David with someone else, sharing his life and having children with someone else, piling up joys and sorrows and experiences with someone else until the memory of Zee was crushed
and forgotten was an agony she’d never imagined.
This is impossible,
she thought.
No system could be so cruel.
Except for logical, for-the-good-of-the-whole Omura.

‘Are you . . . do you have someone already? Is it Mia?’ Zee could not help driving a lit match into the open wound. Who wouldn’t love Mia? Tall, beautiful Mia. Lucky Mia, who
would spend her whole life with David.

‘Mia? No way. She’s like a sister or something. She’s been the reason we’ve been able to see each other at all.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘That scar you felt? Behind my ear? I’m chipped, Zee. We all are. The chip continuously feeds my coordinates back to Omura. If I were to have gone all the places we went to together
on my own, it would have aroused suspicion. But as long as Mia showed up in the vicinity, her chip would relay back the same coordinates and they’d assume we were together.’

Zee sniffed. ‘That was nice of her.’

David laughed lightly. ‘Payback. Believe me, I’ve done the same thing for her plenty of times.’

Another detail from the night before drifted back to Zee – an image of Mia shooting two red beams of light into David’s head, just where the chip was.

‘And that thing she used on you? You went rigid. I thought you were dead.’

‘Mia’s own invention,’ David said. ‘She calls it the stunner.’

‘What does it do?’

‘Chips aren’t the most stable form of technology. They’re vulnerable to bad data, scrambled firmware, even local viruses. They go offline all the time for no reason.
Mia’s stunner takes a chip offline deliberately, without anyone on Omura knowing why. Once you’re offline, they can’t track you until they reconfigure the chip and rebuild the
data, which takes about thirty-six hours. Then they own you again.’

‘David?’

‘Mmm?’ His voice was almost sleepy, as if his story had exhausted him.

‘If it isn’t Mia, is there someone on Omura? Someone you want to go back to?’

‘No.’

‘Then stay here.’ She put her hand on his arm and looked into his eyes. ‘Earth is a good place. When it’s time to go back, stay here.’

‘It isn’t allowed, Zee. No one escapes the Repopulation Act.’

‘Have Mia take you offline. We’ll run away.’

‘They’d rebuild the chip.’

‘Can’t you have the chip removed?’

‘Only if my brain comes with it. It, er, grows little filaments, like tentacles, throughout the cortex.’

‘That’s barbaric.’

‘It’s efficient. And that’s what Omura is all about. Efficiency.’

‘What if you just refused to go back? We could explain what’s going on. It’s a violation of your rights. We’d give you sanctuary here.’

He sighed a slow, heavy sigh. ‘It wouldn’t do any good, Zee. In fact, it would make things worse. If they ever find out about us they’ll force me home and erase you, as an
example to everyone else. I’ve put you in enough danger already. I never meant to, but I’ve never felt like this about anyone before.’

‘Neither have I.’

‘Then I’m doubly sorry. And I’m going to try to repair the damage.’ He stood up and started gathering things scattered on the table. The accelerator, a video cube, the
alien ID he was required never to be without. He carried a cereal bowl and plate to the sink, washed them and set them carefully on the counter.

‘What are you doing, David?’

‘What I should have done weeks ago. Getting out of your life before they find out about you.’

‘That’s not fair!’ she cried angrily.

‘I know it isn’t. The Central Governing Authority —’

‘I don’t mean the Central Governing Authority, I mean you!
You’re
not fair.’

‘Zee . . .’

‘You can’t make all the decisions for us. Not if you really care about me.’ She waited until her breathing slowed to normal, as surprised as he was by her outburst.
‘Please. You won’t be back online until tomorrow afternoon. Stay. Hold me. Just for tonight.’ She took his hand and met his gaze. ‘My decision. No matter what happens. I
want to be with you. Understood?’

He nodded slightly. ‘Do you always get your own way like this?’ he asked, unable to hide a faint, dawning smile.

‘I don’t really know,’ she said triumphantly. ‘I’ve never wanted my own way all that much. Just with you.’

‘Me too,’ he said, beginning a kiss that started at her temples and swept all the way down to her throat. ‘Just with you.’

No one had ever kissed her throat before. Who knew it would make her so delirious with pleasure that when he pulled away from her she almost fell over?

‘I nearly forgot about these,’ he said, pulling from his pocket the small gold box he’d given her the night before.

‘Oh! My orbiting pearl earrings! I thought the mugger took them and I’d never see them again.’ She opened the box and saw the little pearls orbiting each of the central pearls.
‘And look! Not a pearl lost!’

He put his arms around her, then tapped the wall until the light faded to the faintest blue glow. ‘That’s the thing about orbiting pearls,’ he murmured. ‘They always find
each other. No matter what pulls them apart.’

Hours later, David stood at the end of the bed, fully dressed and looking down at Zee. As he watched her sleeping, he memorised all the things he loved about her. The way her
dark red hair flowed across the pillow like a river running over its banks. The fact that her eyes weren’t blue or green, like most redheads, but the colour of cherry cola, and that the arch
of her eyebrows made it seem that life itself was a continual surprise to her.

Beside her on the nightstand, next to her orbiting pearl earrings, lay the eagle medallion she’d given him. He’d known at once that it must have cost her dearly – empaths
didn’t earn all that much, and she’d talked about a pair of sandals with moonstones that she’d wanted but ended up without. That she’d bought the medallion, then been too
shy to give it to him, made him treasure it all the more. He hoped she’d know this when she saw that it was gone. As quietly as he could, he removed it from the nightstand and slipped the
leather thong over his head.