Flanked Page 26

  “Aaron Brady, Minneapolis...” He had to be missing something, some key that would unlock the code, hand him his father. “Aaron Brady, anywhere...”

  “Joe.” A tug on his pantleg, and Devin sat at his feet, his eyes squinted closed, his face tight with pain or pity, Joe couldn’t tell.

  “He’s there, papi. I just have to get the right keyword. I can find him.” Joe turned back to the screen. “Aaron Brady, Minneapolis, between forty and fifty years old.”

  Four matches. Two blonds. A redhead. One with dark hair.

  Joe touched that photo. “Enlarge.”

  The man had laugh lines. Dimples. Deep, dark brown eyes.

  Joe stared and stared. He closed his eyes. “End search.”

  “Did you find him?” Devin still sat at Joe’s feet. His eyes watered, the way they did when he tried to see bright objects. That symptom had started a few days ago.

  Joe patted Devin’s head, wished he could hold him. Be held.

  “It wasn’t him.”

  He looked at the others — Flix, Peter, and Aria sitting on the floor, Clinton and Maribou in their matching chairs. Saw their pity. His face heated, and he forced himself to shrug. “It was a longshot. If he was still around, he never would have left me in Austin so many years.”

  “Sit down, sweetheart,” Maribou said. “Let yourself be comforted.”

  Joe’s knees buckled slightly. But before he could be an idiot and give himself and Devin away, Aria patted the floor. “Come here, baby.”

  The last thing he wanted was to sit next to Aria and receive her comfort, live a lie. But he couldn’t take the chance. Clinton and Maribou had been gracious hosts, not seeming to care about skin color, probably because Maribou would have been an outcast, too. That didn’t mean they’d accept a romantic relationship between men. Joe brushed his leg against Devin’s back as he walked past and sat next to Aria.

  When she put her arm around his waist, he waited until their hosts had turned their attention back to the EC before shrugging off her hollow touch.

  TWENTY

  That night, Joe hid in the bathroom and splashed water on his face. He dried off with the shoulder of his shirt, then held the edges of the smooth porcelain sink and took a good look at himself in the tiny, warped mirror in front of him.

  His father’s hair. If not the color, at least the curl and the silkiness. His father’s skin, paler than any other Mexican kid he’d ever known. His dad’s ears. Dad had always said Mom joked they were his best features, so he was glad they got passed down to their only child.

  That boy he’d been when Dad left. Too small, too skinny, too pale. Too smart. But dumb enough to hold on to a dream for half his life.

  Mom had been dead thirteen years. How long ago had his father joined her?

  Because that’s what this meant, right? This absence on the EC? His father was dead. Joe had half-expected it. Sometimes he’d even hoped for it, those times when he’d been so sure, so angry, that he’d been abandoned. He didn’t feel that way now.

  He opened the little cabinet behind the mirror and rifled through Clinton and Maribou’s things. No useful medicine, not even old-fashioned NSAIDs. He found a mostly-full bottle of stomach soothers and pocketed half of them. When they ran out of nausea meds — and he was more and more sure that would happen before they got to Minneapolis — these might help Devin some.

  Joe turned off the light and headed for the bedroom, where he found Aria already curled up under the threadbare covers. He lay down, careful not to touch her.

  “Are they all settled down in the barn?” Aria asked.

  Joe grunted. Devin and the boys had been sent to the poorly heated barn because Clinton and Maribou didn’t have room for them in the house. Leaving Devin out there, trusting his headaches to Flix and Peter’s care, cut almost as bad as lying in this bed with Aria, pretending to be married. He’d gone out there earlier, given Devin his medicine and a biting kiss hard enough to feel for hours — a kiss to keep. “They’re all okay.”

  “His abuela seemed like a piece of work.”

  “I guess.” Joe hadn’t really given the woman much thought. She was clearly related to Devin, with her bright blue eyes, her elegant nose and jaw. That room she was in, with all the books — Devin would love that when he found her. Not until fall, she’d said. Maybe Joe would get to keep Devin until then. Devin hadn’t said much about his grandmother one way or the other when Joe had gone out to the barn to check on him.

  Aria turned on her side to face him. “That man? Aaron Brady?”

  “I’m not talking about this with you.”

  “You need to talk to someone.”

  “Not you. Not the girl who was lucky enough to have a father-figure and threw that away.”

  “Screw you.” Aria flopped onto her back. “You don’t know what was going on with me.”

  “I know you hurt Navarro. I know you had something so good, and you wrecked it and don’t even care.” Joe wasn’t even sure he believed what he was saying, but he needed to stop groping his own guts and dig into someone else. “And, if that’s not bad enough, you set us up, tried to get us killed.”

  “Lower your voice,” Aria hissed. “You do not know what you are talking about. I tried to save you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Oh look, Mr. Perfect knows bad words. Do you really think I would have hurt you on purpose?”

  Joe shook his head, brushing off the thought. “I just want to sleep, Aria.”

  “Fine. Enjoy the bed I snagged for you by thinking fast when Maribou asked me about our group.”

  “You think I care about a bed when Devin’s out there hurting in the cold?”

  “I know you don’t, but you’re too big an idiot to see what everyone else does. You” — Aria poked his ribs, hard — “think nothing of sacrificing yourself to take care of the rest of us, and it doesn’t help us. It doesn’t make Devin well, and it doesn’t make Peter stronger. It doesn’t stop Flix’s nightmares. And it doesn’t help me forgive myself.”

  Joe deflated, his snappy, mean comeback dying on his lips. “I didn’t know you’d been paying attention.”

  Aria turned and faced away from Joe. The cloudy moonlight coming in through the window shone weakly on her frizzy-fried hair. “You needed a good night’s rest.”

  Joe thought about it for a few minutes, until she was probably asleep. “Aaron Brady was my father.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Nine years. He was supposed to go to Minneapolis, then come back for me. Lucky me, I got to be a prostitute instead of a scientist.”

  Aria hummed but didn’t try to comfort him. Joe appreciated that. Made him glad he hadn’t told her the worst of it, the beatings and rapes that happened after his father had left.

  “By the time we got to Purcell,” Aria said, “I was so sick of Navi and Lili. She’s bossy and he’s, you know, him.”

  “Hard.”

  “Yeah. Then we pull into this dinky little piece of crap town, with houses like cages, and I was so mad. How many books did we read, you and me? Hundreds.”

  “At least.” They’d read everything Joe got his hands on from the half-destroyed local branch of the old library. Love stories and adventures, textbooks, mysteries. Until Devin came along, Aria had been the only person Joe had met who loved reading as much as he did.

  “And never, in any of those books, was the heroine some dirt-poor girl who spent her entire adult life helping her daddy in some backwash town, content while a whole amazing world went on just beyond her reach.”

  “You wanted more.”

  “Damned right I did.”

  Joe didn’t have to stretch his imagination to know how that felt. Wasn’t that a big part of the fairytale of his father? That he’d help Joe escape and become who he was meant to be?

  “So anyway,” Aria said, “Sanders started coming around, talking to Navi about revolt and reclaiming our heritage. Navi didn’t want any part of it,
and that pissed me off, too. I wanted those things Sanders dangled in front of Navi.”

  “Then when Navarro wouldn’t join up...”

  “I thought it was the best of both worlds. I get what I want; Sanders leaves Navi — and my sisters — alone. I didn’t even imagine what Sanders would make me do for my initiation. I thought it’d be sex or something.”

  “Hurting Navarro?” Joe guessed.

  “And even that seemed like a blessing. Navi’s way too important to the town to kill, and it hit me in a really scary way that Sanders could have asked me to kill Lili or Sadie. And if I’d backed down, he could’ve killed one of them just to spite me. Hell, I’m shocked he didn’t do something like that to make a point to Navi.”

  The night of the bombing, before Joe knew the Sons had kidnapped Devin, he’d been certain Aria’s story was something along those lines. She may have always had her head in the clouds, but she loved her family the same fierce way they loved her. “I’m sorry I assumed the worst.”

  Aria laughed, wet and pained. “I gave you every reason to.” She rolled over and laid a hand on Joe’s forearm, her touch lighter than even Peter’s rare, tentative contact. “When I told you to find your friends in the greenhouse, I wasn’t trying to trap you. I had faith in you. I still have faith in you.”

  “So why did the Sons turn up at the greenhouse?”

  “Your decoy plan worked. We saw my family and those other guys heading out toward the old compound. We were far enough away from them that Sanders believed you were with them, but one of the villagers saw you in the greenhouse, thought you were trying to rob the town of food, and ran to tell Sanders.”

  “And you couldn’t think of a diversion?”

  “You try getting three or four minutes to think of a reason to deter a guy who’s out for blood. It’s not that easy. I did the best I could. He and I talked about how clever you were to think of a plan that tricked us, and I told him you were just misguided, warped by the way you’d been abused.”

  Joe bristled at the implication that his time at Flights of Fantasy had been abuse. He knew Aria had always seen it that way, but he wasn’t about to chalk up five years of his life to being a victim. “Go on.”

  “He didn’t know you and Devin were together; I didn’t know you were together.” Her voice grew ragged. “It was something even Sadie didn’t tell me.”

  “She was such a great girl.”

  “So much more than you even know. She was the best of us, the light. My light. I don’t even know how to keep...” Her voice caught and faded. It took her a moment before she continued. “I know this is going to hurt to hear, but I had him talked into keeping you, getting you deprogrammed, and making you loyal to him.”

  “I would never be loyal to that sick bastard.”

  “I know. I figured you’d leave or kill Sanders and take over.”

  “God, Aria, you think I could be that kind of brutal monster?”

  “It wasn’t all brutal.”

  If that statement was supposed to make Joe feel sympathetic, it didn’t work. “He meant to kill Flix and sell Devin and Peter. I bet he killed these people whose house we stopped at just before Purcell.”

  “I didn’t know he planned to kill Flix until right before he pointed the gun. I thought he’d just send him back with Devin and Peter.”

  “That’s awful enough.”

  “And those people you mentioned... A man and woman in a house with a garden?”

  Joe wasn’t sure what made him angrier, that she knew about the dead people, or that she’d been willing to let Devin and the kids suffer. “It wasn’t even like you needed those people’s food. Their garden was rotting, untouched.”

  “They were old friends of Cadia’s. Good gardeners. And ex-military, both of them. They’d served in the Intracontinental War. We wanted them to set up a poc community near Oklahoma City.”

  “Poc?”

  “‘People of color.’ Remember the sign on the back side of the Maze-On store? Some New Americans use it as a slur. Sanders called us patriots of change.”

  “Some of the most reprehensible people drape themselves in flags and say they’re liberators.”

  Aria scowled. “They were like you, the people, confident and proud. They were self-sufficient, so what did they care that their brothers and sisters went hungry and died or fed off the table scraps of people who only wield power because they had it first.”

  Blah, blah, blah. None of that excused what Sanders had done. What Aria had done. “What happened to those people with the garden?”

  “They said no. Sanders said that wasn’t an option, and I swear, I thought one of them was reaching in their pocket for a weapon.”

  “Oh, Aria...” His friend. The girl who read and read.

  “Don’t worry. I paid for it.” Her voice dripped with derision. “That night at the greenhouse, I killed almost all my friends. Liliana hates me. Navi sent me away because he can’t stand to look at me.”

  “Navarro sent you away to keep you safe.”

  “I killed my sister.” The bed shook with Aria’s raspy, stuttering breaths. “I killed the only person in the whole goddamned world who still loved me. She was funny and never hurt anyone and she loved me, Joe. God, I killed her.”

  Not a single word of comfort came to Joe. Anything positive he could say would be a lie. He swallowed down the lump in his throat and wiped his eyes. When Aria turned away, he petted her hair. After a while, her shaky breathing evened and slowed. Joe scooted closer and wrapped his arm around her waist.

  “This would have been my teenage fantasy, you know,” Aria said, “you holding me.”

  “I’m with —”

  “I’m under no delusions. I see how you look at him. But Joe?”

  “What?”

  “There are two sides to America, his and ours. One day, you’re going to have to decide which side of the line you’re on. And you’re going to have to accept the fact that it may not be the same side as Devin.”

  He couldn’t conjure even one rebuttal. “Goodnight, Aria.”

  “Sleep well.”

  Joe was certain he wouldn’t be able to sleep at all.

  ***

  Devin sat in what he thought was probably the kitchen and got ready to help Maribou snap beans, whatever the hell that meant. He couldn’t see worth shit, and the pills everyone kept feeding him may have dulled his headache, but they also made him sleepy as fuck. He could be in the bathroom or a coat closet for all he knew.

  He felt the hard, flat surface in front of him, slid his feet along the smooth floor until one of them hit something. He followed the line of it. Table leg. Probably kitchen for real, then.

  Joe and the useful people were out helping Clinton with farm-type chores. Something about patching the barn roof and baling hay. With his fingertips, Devin traced the edges of the table and tried not to be jealous.

  Jealous might not be the right word. Scared shitless, more like. The first time he got blinded, he’d been worried, but nothing like this. Something was wrong inside his head. What if it was the kind of problem that couldn’t be fixed?

  “So, sweetie...” A warm hand patted Devin’s shoulder, and he jumped enough to hit his knees on the underside of the table. Maribou laughed. “Sorry. You are wound tighter than a tick.”

  “Being all but blind will do that, ma’am.”

  Something scraped the floor, probably a chair.

  “I’m going to set a bowl of beans in front of you, and we can get started. Ever snap beans before?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Here.” Her soft hands, so small, grabbed one of Devin’s hands and placed a thin, firm cylinder in his grasp. Must be the bean.

  He rotated and rolled it, so different from what he’d been expecting. At home, beans were short and thick little rounded stubs, firm and pulpy. This felt...still firm, but more solid, like it wouldn’t fall apart if he put it in his mouth.

  “I’ve never heard of beans like th
is,” he said.

  “I’ve never heard of beans any different.” The soft hands were back, guiding Devin to hold the bean in the middle. Maribou picked up Devin’s other hand and guided it toward the end. “Feel that little nubbin there? You’re going to snap that off, right near the end. Do the same on the other end. Then one snap in the middle of what’s left.”

  Devin fumbled around and did as Maribou directed. The bean really did make a snapping sound, along with a crisp, satisfying break.

  “You’ve snapped your first bean. Just drop the ends on the floor and make a little pile of the snapped beans there next to the bowl.”

  Devin worked at it until it was almost mindless — the snap-snap of the ends, the bigger crunch in the middle. The chore had a rhythm to it, a soothing pattern. Before long, he had relaxed into the repetition, let it become routine, and his mind began to wander.

  His grandmother was real. She had sounded so...happy. Like she had a fun life. No worries. Maybe it really was like that for her. Maybe when he got to Minneapolis, he could figure out how to contact her. They could meet, his grandfather, too, and with them he would learn how to live like normal people.

  “You and that young man seem awfully close.”

  Devin had almost forgotten Maribou was there. He shifted in his seat and stretched to buy himself time to think of a not-gay answer. “We get along good. Like the same things.”

  “What do you like, Devin?”

  “Food, mainly,” Devin said, and got rewarded with a chuckle. “Also reading.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not now, obviously, because of the vision stuff, but before. I read a lot. Romances, mostly.” Was that too weird? “And books about sheriffs.” That was sort of true, at least. A couple of the romances had featured roguish, widowed sheriffs just looking for the right woman to make them happy again.

  “I like to read, too. Clinton isn’t much for it.”

  Better. If they talked about her, he wouldn’t have to say too much. The medicine made him feel slow and stupid, too. “What do you like to read?”

  “It’s pretty boring. I like biographies. Science journals.”

  Definitely boring. “Why that stuff?”