“Linsey,Linsey,” he breathes. “I thought—I was sure—sure you were—”
His voice breaks, and now I’m extra relieved I can’t see his face, because I’m pretty sure what I’d see is the head of the space program completely breaking down. I almost wish he could seemyface, though; I am not Linsey, and I really should correct him—should clear up the confusion, that I onlysoundlike my mother—but—
But—
How? I can’t seem to get the words out, and even if I could, would they even be helpful? Would he crumble under the weight of knowing that someone he cares deeply about didn’t make it? Would Nashville crumble along with him, and maybe even the entire space program, already tenuous in its recovery after the virus hit so hard?
I can still be honest about the most important things—get his advice on the virus, request a supply delivery ASAP. It might actually work out better for us, now that I think about it, because my mother was a voting member of the board. I,obviously, am not. If any major decisions come down to a board vote, perhaps I can have a real say in our future, vote like she would have wanted to.
Still. Pretending to be my mother was not part of the plan.
My window is closing. I could tell the truth. I could tell him right now.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t call before this morning,” I say, and with that, it is done.
At least the words I’ve actually said are true.
He’s speechless on the other end, but I know he’s still there. I can almost hear his tears. Do I really sound that much like my mother? I never realized it before, but I must.
And grief hears what it wants to hear, I guess.
Fortunately, he doesn’t linger on the personal. He has his moment, and then it’s on to the urgent. “Good, good,” he says, more to himself than me. “This means the quarantine worked up there and you caught it in time—virus spread like wildfire down here, Lins, it’s unbelievable. We’ve taken a pretty bad hit. I thought for sure you were—”
He cuts off, choked up on his own fear, or relief, or both.
“But you’re not, you’renot.”
The silence stretches between us, and again, I’m tempted to fill it with all the things he really should know—but there’s no way the board would let us have a say in our own future if they knew all our parents, all our experts, were dead. There’s noway, not if their majority vote was finally all but unopposed.They’d trample Shapiro without a single look back.
“My apologies for letting your messages go so long unattended,” I say, putting on my best Mom/commander voice. I never heard her on these calls, only in station-wide assemblies and the like, but she had the tendency to be... overly multisyllabic. Not with me, of course. I’m not sure how casual she would have been with Shapiro. “We’ve been caught up with the quarantine, and unfortunately, one of the hardest-hit areas on board the station was Control—Lieutenants Black and Brady—hence our silence.”
My mind spins with strategy, trying to stay two steps ahead of my words at all times. This lie should be safe: it gives, at once, a reason for our silenceanda reason for Zesi to pick up communications in the absence of our lieutenants, should he ever have to answer a call.
He mutters a curse. “I’m sorry to hear it,” he says, not a single trace of suspicion in his voice. “Very sorry indeed. What a loss.” I can almost hear him bowing his head.
He believes me. I’m doing this, I’m actually pulling this off.
Not that I enjoy having to.
“Have any other areas been so drastically affected?” he asks.
All of them, I want to say. But I dodge the question instead, saying, “We could use a shipment whenever your team has fully recovered, but otherwise, we’re managing.” Not too much, not entirely untrue.
“Good, good. Are you able to give me a current head count,just so we know what sort of damage we’re dealing with?”
I freeze, panic. I’ve just let him believe I’m my own mother—thecommander—and that our quarantine has been successful. How can I give him a current head count without immediately backtracking? How can I ask his advice on how to deal with a mutation?
I may have made an enormous mistake.
“Just let me know as soon as you can,” he goes on, mistaking my panic for the confident silence of someone who’s neck deep in tracking down the requested data. “If you’ve lost any other critical team members, we need to know ASAP so we can make arrangements to get their replacements and their families up to the station, too—as well as the arrangements for relocating any members ofLusca’s youth community who find themselves unattached, now that the virus has had its way.”
My head snaps up.
That—
That sounds like—
That sounds like I’ve been right to fear the worst, like every single one of us is in danger of being relocated from the only home we’ve known for our entire lives. With the whole universe at our fingertips, it isn’t unthinkable that we’d want to explore it—but when we’ve lost so much already, and have so little left to cling to, I can’t see a forced relocation going over well withanyone.
