Page 92 of Under Story

“Always nice to stretch your legs,” Eli offers.

The teapot whistles.

“How do you like the neighborhood?” asks Mr. Nakamura. For years, Laurel will refer to him this way. He is younger than she and Eli, but despite this—or, rather, in this universe, because of it—it seems disrespectful to use his first name.

While Eli praises the relative quiet and the local chocolate shop, Laurel walks into the kitchen. Drought, frost, and deforestation have restricted tea production. The wealthy can still afford to discard leaves after a cup, but most people have a kettle like the one she retrieves from a cabinet. Loose tea goes in one half of a vacuum-sealed compartment, and after brewing, the other half dehydrates the leaves for further use. Laurel initiates the dehydration process before she brings three teacups to the living room.

“You’ve been here three years, I think?” asks Mr. Nakamura, after thanking Laurel for the tea.

“That’s right,” she says, sitting. When Eli touches her arm, Laurel sees her error: she was thinking of herself, not her double. She flushes.

“Don’t be afraid,” the overtaker says.

Eli speaks first. “What do you know?”

“About this, more than most. Some think the overtakers know everything. That isn’t true. I see around corners and under surfaces, in part because of people like you, who arrive infrequently—very infrequently—and tell us about where they came from.”

In the silence that follows, Mr. Nakamura takes his first sip of tea.

“Is that what you want from us?” Eli asks. “Information?”

To Laurel, the question sounds harsh. But perhaps he isn’t wrong to perceive an exchange.

“I come with news—news I believe you want very much. I offer it freely. What you choose to tell me in return, if you do so at all, is your decision. Of course, the less you share, the less you might learn. We have different pieces of the puzzle.”

“If we talk to you, who will you tell?” asks Eli.

Mr. Nakamura returns his teacup to its saucer. “There are people who want to find and control the kind of paths that brought you here. My purposes are antithetical to theirs. Our conversation would go no further than my father, as my son revealed the secrets of our kind to me.” In response to their surprise, he adds, “Often the gift runs in families.”

“The gift,” Laurel repeats. She thinks of the screens in the graveyard. She assumed that interpreting their contents was a matter of science.

“Overtaking is less a manual job than a mystical one,” Mr. Nakamura says. Only Eli has been able to read her so easily.

“Is it like a religious position?” asks Eli.

Mr. Nakamura crosses one leg over the other. Beneath his pantlegs are work boots, chipped with mud.

“The overtakers are not aligned with any religion, though we work in partnership with religious institutions. Individually, some of us practice; others don’t. What we share is an ability to interpret certain texts, and a sense for the moment of rupture that marks life’s beginning.”

Eli looks skeptical. There is a strange energy between him and the overtaker, almost one of competition, though it seems to come mainly from Eli’s side.

“What does that mean?” he asks.

“In the cemetery, we use electricity to track the process of composition. Births that happen this way are straightforward; some debate whether they require an overtaker at all. The mark of the gift is the ability to do our work elsewhere.”

The overtaker folds his hands.

“You await the birth of a child,” he says.

“Yes,” says Laurel, from an upper portion of her throat.

“I believe that you’ll find him in a place you know—the same place where you lost him before. But remote births are unpredictable. Most of the time, the newborn recovers. Still, there are risks.”

Eli’s shoulders are tense. “Do you mean he could die?”

The overtaker seems to wince, just as the grocery clerk did when Laurel asked about the meat section.

“That isn’t possible here—not the way you understand it. But life can be compromised in other ways.”