But he loved me. That much was clear.
And I adored him.
I’d have done the job just because he’d asked it.
I’d done it before.
The last job was how we’d gotten here. I’d been younger then and I hadn’t completely understood.
But I’d understood when we were done.
And I’d hated myself.
"Isn’t there another way?" I found myself asking.
He put his hand on the back of my head, propelling me forward. "You know better," he said. "There’s nothing here for us."
"There might not be anything in Colony Latina, either."
"They’re getting shipments from the U.N. Seems they vowed to negotiate a peace."
"Then everyone will want to go."
"But not everyone can," he said. "We can." He touched his pocket. I saw the bulge of his credit slip. "If you do the job."
It had been easier when I didn’t know. When doing a job meant just that. When I didn’t have other things to consider. After the first job, my father asked where I had gotten the morals. He said I hadn’t inherited them from him, and I hadn’t. I knew that. I suggested maybe Mother, and he had laughed, saying no mother who gave birth to me had morals either.
"Don’t think about it, honey," he’d said. "Just do."
Just do. I opened my mouth-to say what, I don’t know-and felt hot liquid splatter me. An exit wound had opened in his chest, spraying his blood all around. People screamed and backed away. I screamed. I didn’t see where the shot had come from, only that it had come.
The blood moved slowly, more slowly than I would have expected.
He fell forward and I knew I wouldn’t be able to move him, I wouldn’t be able to grab the credit slip, wouldn’t be able to get to Colony Latina, wouldn’t have to do the job.
Faces, unbloodied faces, appeared around me.
They hadn’t killed him for the slip.
I turned and ran, as he once told me to do, ran as fast as I could, blasting as I went, watching people duck or cover their ears or wrap their arms around their heads.
I ran until I saw the sign.
The tiny prefab with the Red Crescent painted on its door, the Red Cross on its windows. I stopped blasting and tumbled inside, bloody, terrified, and completely alone.
I woke up to find my husband’s arms around me, my head buried in his shoulder. He was rocking me as if I were one of the girls, murmuring in my ear, cradling me and making me feel safe. I was crying and shaking, my throat raw with tears or with the aftereffects of screams.
Our door was shut and locked, something that we only did when we were amorous. He must have had House do it, so no one would walk in on us.
He stroked my hair, wiped the tears from my face. "You should leave your link on at night," he said tenderly. "I could have manipulated the dream, made it into something pleasant."
We used to do that for each other when we were first married. It had been a way to mesh our different sexual needs, a way to discover each other’s thoughts and desires.
We hadn’t done it in a long, long time.
"Do you want to tell me about it?" he asked.
So I did.
He buried his face in my hair. It had been a long time since he had done that, too, since he had shown that kind of vulnerability with me.
"It’s Echea," he said.
"I know," I said. That much was obvious. I had been thinking about her so much that she had worked her way into my dreams.
"No," he said. "It’s nothing to be calm about." He sat up, kept his hand on me, and peered into my face. "First Susan, then you. It’s like she’s a poison that’s infecting my family."
The moment of closeness shattered. I didn’t pull away from him, but it took great control not to. "She’s our child."
"No," he said. "She’s someone else’s child, and she’s disrupting our household."
"Babies disrupt households. It took a while, but you accepted that."
"And if Echea had come to us as a baby, I would have accepted her. But she didn’t. She has problems that we did not expect."
"The documents we signed said that we must treat those problems as our own."
His grip on my shoulder grew tighter. He probably didn’t realize he was doing it. "They also said that the child had been inspected and was guaranteed illness free."
"You think some kind of illness is causing these dreams? That they’re being passed from Echea to us like a virus?"
"Aren’t they?" he asked. "Susan dreamed of a man who died. Someone whom she didn’t want to go. Then ‘they’ pulled her away from him. You dream of your father’s death-"
"They’re different," I said. "Susan dreamed of a man’s face exploding, and being captured. I dreamed of a man being shot, and of running away."
"But those are just details."
"Dream details," I said. "We’ve all been talking to Echea. I’m sure that some of her memories have woven their way into our dreams, just as our daily experiences do, or the vids we’ve seen. It’s not that unusual."
"There were no night terrors in this household until she came," he said.
"And no one had gone through any trauma until she arrived, either." I pulled away from him now. "What we’ve gone through is small compared to her. Your parents’ deaths, mine, the birth of the girls, a few bad investments, these things are all minor. We still live in the house you were born in. We swim in the lake of our childhood. We have grown wealthier. We have wonderful daughters. That’s why we took Echea."
"To learn trauma?"
"No," I said. "Because we could take her, and so many others can’t."