Icons (35 page)

“Can they do it without the Icon?” I whisper.

Nobody dares answer.

Have we done enough?

Silence falls over the Hole. In the streets, the people stand motionless.

“Ro! Lucas!” I stretch out my hands, but Tima is already coiled against Lucas’s body. Ro dives toward me, as if he could shield me from the Lords themselves.

“Don’t look—” shouts Lucas. As if that could stop The Day from happening all over again.

My heart is pounding.

I don’t take my eyes off the ships.

My heart is pounding.

I watch as the Carrier ships align in a perfect circle over the Hole.

My heart is pounding.

I watch as a stream of light unites the ships, like the spokes of a wheel.

My heart is pounding.

I watch as the sky flashes blinding white, so bright that my eyes blur.

My heart stops pounding.

My heart stops.

My heart

My

A sound like thunder echoes across the sky. I feel a jolt of energy coursing through me, almost lifting me off my feet. It’s as though all the energy from the Lords’ ships is flowing through the entire population of the Hole, to me. We are all connected. And I accept it. I take it in and release it back into the heavens.

The clouds break open, and the air fills with rain.

I exhale, and slowly, slowly—my heart begins to beat again.

Silence.

Then I watch in awe as the ships slowly, grudgingly, rise to the clouds and disappear.

A cheer builds from the city below, the streets singing and shouting, laughing and catcalling.

They’ve failed. The Lords. They’ve retreated.

Ro grabs me into a hug the size of the city, and we roll in the rubble like puppies.

Because the Hole remains.

Tima jumps onto Lucas’s back, screaming at the top of her lungs. I can hear her voice carry over the hilltop and across the city. Brutus barks, chasing wildly after her.

Because today is not The Day.

Lucas trips over Ro, and Tima lands on me, and all four of us become one pile of tangled limbs, laughing.

Because we are not a Silent City—not today, not ever again.

We lie back on the dirt, staring up at the sky, panting. I find myself caught between Lucas and Ro, one hand tangled in Lucas’s gold hair, one wedged beneath Ro’s back.

Today, right now, they feel exactly the same to me.

Alive.

We stay like this for a moment. Still. Then Tima sits up and raises her arms to welcome the rain. “Even the sky is happy for us.” Ro smiles at me with a look of wonder.

“What did you do, Dol?” Tima turns to me, a shock of silver hair and wild eyes, curious.

I try to put the answer into words. “I don’t know. I think, somehow, I passed our immunity on to them.”

Lucas sits up. “The entire city?”

I nod. “With this.” I hold up the Icon shard, now blackened in my hand.

“And this,” says Ro, touching my heart with a knowing smile. It’s impossible not to smile back.

“It’s our city now,” says Tima. Lucas nods, but as he turns his head toward the coast and Santa Catalina, I see his eyes and feel what he feels.

There are many ways to lose a family
, I remember.

Ro stands up, holding out his hand to me. “That’s one down. Only twelve more to go.”

I take his hand and offer mine to Lucas, who grabs Tima. We pull each other up.

As I make my way down the hill, I hold on to my friends, hand in hand, and know Tima is right.

There is no way to stop the demonstrations now. They will say what they will. They will speak the truth and nothing else.

The Projects will be empty
, I think.

The Embassy will be powerless
, I hope.

At least in the Hole.

For now, for a moment, this moment—the Hole has found its voice.

We know the plan. We do as we said we would. By early light, we have found our way back to the Cathedral, past the fires and the torches and the singing and the celebrations. When I look up toward the Observatory, I see it is still lit with a bonfire as big as the Icon itself.

Inside the gates of Our Lady of the Angels, Tima is so happy to see Fortis she flings her arms around him and kisses him on both cheeks—even though he’s already juggling a flask in each hand.

Ro disappears into a tightening circle of his Rebellion friends. They grab him, hoisting him off the ground, and he dives back into the throng of them, as if they were all made of the same wild energy.

I don’t need to listen to know he is busily embroidering our story, watching it grow like wildfire with every retelling.

Let him.

I stumble toward the others, but I find my legs won’t support me any longer. I am so exhausted I can’t speak, I can’t move.

Lucas sees my legs buckle before I can hit the stone floor. Wordlessly, he scoops me up and carries me away through the crowd. He knows. His chest is warm and steady, even though he’s scorched and bruised from the blast. I listen to the beat of his heart, all the way until he leaves me, curled against the low cot.

“There,” Lucas says, pulling a thin army blanket up to my chin. He looks at me, affectionately.

There
, I think.

Home.

I can’t say anything now—not to Lucas, or to anyone—and he doesn’t make me try. So instead, I lie there in the darkness, numb and still, until Fortis awakens me.

Time to leave the Hole behind.

By noon light, we have found our way back to the Tracks. There are no carloads of ragged Remnants, headed to the Projects. The Sympas are on high alert, though, and the Tracks are still dangerous. We slip back to the last Embassy prison car, where a certain Merk and a coat of explosives and pack of four thousand digs sees to it
that four exhausted prisoners are transported back to a long-forgotten Mission in the Grasslands.

La Purísima.

What remains of it. The fields are torched. The flocks are scattered and gone. The trees are charred black sticks.

Yet Bigger and Biggest are having bowls of bread and milk in the kitchen when we arrive. The glass has been broken from the windows, but Bigger has covered them with burlap, all the same. Bigger knocks his bowl off the table, he is so surprised. I can’t tell which one of us is happier to see the other.

Biggest, as she always does, takes one look at me and makes me a bed in front of the oven.

The goats lap up the spilled milk, and I try to choke out the words to introduce Bigger and Biggest to my friends.

That night, I sleep next to Ro and Tima and Lucas and Fortis on the warm tiles of the kitchen floor. I wake up to find that Fortis has drawn his insane coat, full of strange wonders and secret curiosities, all the way over me. I’m so drained, all I can do is lie there and breathe. Only one thought struggles to the surface of my mind.

They aren’t perfect. They aren’t much. They didn’t grow me in their bellies or a lab or adopt me through the
Embassy. I don’t know the total truth of them, or the truth behind the truths.

But it doesn’t matter. For better, for worse, here we are. What we have is one another.

This is my family now.

DPPT (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE)

Catalogue at Time of Death includes:

45. Grass Rebellion propaganda flyer, text-scan follows:

Birds used to sound like rubber squeak toys, the kind you’d give a dog. They sounded like the rapid flutter of wings or a folded paper fan. A bicycle tire that made the same noise in the same place as it turned, over and over. A monkey having a tantrum, some of them. An old mattress right when you sit on it. Sometimes, early in the morning, they sounded like all those things at once.

This is what the Padre told me.

I think about it, as I scrub the dirt from my arms and legs, in the dripping faucet in the barn. I grab another handful of straw, and smile as I remember the hot showers and pristine plumbing of the Embassy. My stomach roils, though, at the thought of the Ambassador, and I close my eyes, willing the memories away.

Lucas has been gone for a full day now, nearly twenty-four hours. He’s gone to see about his mother, if there’s anything or anyone left to see. When I’m honest with myself—really honest—I don’t know if he’s ever coming back.

I force myself to think about the birds again.

Birds.

I wonder if my father heard many birds. I spent an hour, this morning, rummaging through the Padre’s desk, learning what I could about my family, from the old photographs the Padre kept for me. Old photographs and older papers. My father worked for the Forest Service of the Californias. Apparently he would sit for long hours in the middle of the Grasslands, holding binoculars to his eyes, hoping to keep the trees and the animals safe from forest fires. My mother sketched him that way, sitting in a tree.

My own father was waiting for disaster but looking in the wrong place. He wasn’t looking at the skies. He was looking at the trees.

I turn off the dripping faucet.

I wonder, as I pull on my clothes and wring the water out of my hair, what pulled my father to the wilds?

Perhaps it was the same thing that drew him to my mother. I imagine many sunsets and sunrises between them, between all of us, in the life I lost, unlived.

She would have taught me how to draw. He would have taught me how to use the binoculars. I would have listened to the sounds of many thousands of birds.

I wonder what it is I’ll miss, when all this is gone. Like the birds. If things don’t work out for us, or the city, or the Rebellion.

Ro, and Lucas. When they aren’t attacking each other.

Tima’s hands.

Fortis and his magical jacket.

Doc and his jokes.

I think of everything we have lost, and everything the Lords have left us.

Somehow there is still so much more to lose.

I am listening for the birds in the silence, when I hear the sound of footsteps behind me. I feel the familiar warmth, spreading from the outside in, and then from my inside out.

I can’t believe it, but there’s no other feeling exactly like his. It has to be true.

I say it before I see him.

“Lucas?” I fling myself toward him, hurtling myself into him. “I was starting to think you were dead.” The words don’t carry enough weight. They can’t. They’re only words. They don’t hurt the way the not-knowing did.

He smiles. “I’m not. I’m here.”

The flush creeps from my heart to my cheeks. “What
happened?” I look up at him, reaching my arms more tightly around his neck.

“I found my way to Santa Catalina, but I couldn’t cross. They say the Embassy is empty. I didn’t stay long, and it took me a while to get out. They’ve closed the Tracks for good now, Dol. The day after the blast.”

“And your mother?” I hold my breath.

“She’s gone. GAP Miyazawa recalled her to the Pentagon. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.” His words are grim, but not unexpected.

Casualties of war, Fortis would say. I know it means something different to Lucas, whatever she was or wasn’t to him.

“I’m sorry.”

I put my hand on his cheek. His mouth twists into a smile. The barest part of one.

“I like you,” he says. “How long am I going to have to keep acting like I don’t?”

“You’re not doing a very good job.” I smile back at him.

“I’m not?” He looks surprised, and I laugh.

I pull my head back to where we can lock our eyes together. “I like you too, Lucas.” I smile.

We kiss.

We really kiss.

Kissing Lucas is like kissing a kiss itself. There’s no way to explain it any better than that. And I don’t even want to try.