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  “Why is it sacred?” Anna asked.

  “I found my way here,” Peru looked at Anna, a strange expression on her face—a half smirk with a defiant eyebrow. She had searched Anna’s face for a reaction. When none came, Peru continued.

  “I found my way here, after that first night. And last year, I found my way here again. The Mendejano perform first rites here. As a way of fixing this land after the pharmas laid it to waste,” she said.

  “First rites?” Anna’d asked, and so had begun Peru’s one and only divulgence of information. She never talked about her time alone, before or after that day they met in Gene. When they were together, Peru interacted freely. She acted as if they were the couple they appeared to be and went out of her way to make Anna laugh. But when she went off on her own for hours, and occasionally a day or two for an assigned real, those times were well-guarded secrets.

  But that day Peru talked about those she called her family, saying more than she had in all the time that they knew each other. Much later Anna learned the reason for the sudden openness. It was Peru’s day of confession, as close to a Mendejano holiday as Anna was likely to experience. Until then she hadn’t known that Peru had a faith, or anything about the times that Peru drifted away.

  Peru carefully laid the contents of their packs at the edge of the clearing. She took each item out slowly and painstakingly placed each one so that it created the shape of a circle.

  “This is the inner circle,” Peru said. She continued. “Objects have the power to create change. But most people have gotten it wrong. They can’t make you a better person or happier in and of themselves. Every object is a tool.”

  Anna peered at Peru, trying to decipher her meaning.

  “So this leaf?” Anna asked.

  Peru nodded. “Yes, a tool.”

  “What can it do?” Anna asked.

  “It can make you see beauty. It can hide what’s beautiful—the bird in a tree, for example,” Peru said, pulling back a branch on a nearby tree.

  Anna still couldn’t dispel her confusion; she felt a further distance opening between them.

  “It’s all about what you can make out of what you have. Isn’t that right?” Peru had looked at her pointedly.

  It was the first time she’d said anything about being created. Peru didn’t speak of it again until months after that day, and even then it came out sideways. She had just received an offer for an assignment at twice what she’d once been paid for the same fantasy. Still Peru had seemed less than pleased and Anna saw her opportunity.

  “Maybe it’s time to quit. We could do more harvesting,” Anna said. “I mean we’re seventeen now.”

  “You are seventeen,” Peru said from the bed where she sat.

  Heat flushed Anna’s face but she continued. “—And we have money. We could move somewhere permanent, maybe go to school.”

  “I can’t go to school, Anna. I have no records.”

  “We can get records anywhere in this town for less credits than a nice meal. You know that.”

  “I don’t need school. I learn quickly,” Peru said, looking at Anna steadily. “And why would I want to stop? Virtu has been good to me. It took care of me when there was nothing else.”

  “How did—” Anna began. Peru glared at her, and she again abandoned that line of questioning.

  “You’ve no idea what can happen to a girl alone out there,” Peru said.

  “I’ve some idea,” Anna replied. Peru ignored her.

  “Besides, they say I’m very good at it. Clean slate and all,” Peru replied sharply. There was a warning in her tone Anna heeded it. Peru exhaled slowly and turned her whole body to Anna.

  “Why?” Peru asked.

  Finally, she had asked. Anna turned and faced Peru, surprised to see tears in her eyes. The edgy expression remained.

  “I—I don’t know,” Anna said. Peru regarded her with contempt.

  “You don’t know why you made me?”

  “I was terrified. In shock. Arrogant. I don’t know, Peru. I don’t know what you want me to say. I did it and I can’t undo it.” She gestured to Peru. “Look at you. You’re amazing. Beautiful, strong, better at life than I am, I think. Certainly tougher. You’re a fighter. You’re the best—”

  “—thing that you’ve ever done,” Peru finished.

  “You know I wasn’t going to say that.”

  Peru grunted and walked over to Anna, stopped when they were nose to nose and said, “You just didn’t want to be alone.”

  With that she left the room, slamming the door behind her.

  Peru didn’t return until much later that night. The front door to the room crashed open, leaving a dent in the wall behind it. As it crept back on its hinges, Peru entered. Leaves stuck out of her hair at odd angles. Mud covered her clothes; a jagged hole had been ripped in the leg of her pants.

  Anna watched warily from the bathroom doorway as Peru dragged over to her—she smelled of rank river water—and stopped a meter in front of her. Peru reached out to the virtu pack on the dresser and went to put it on Anna. Anna started to back away and Peru quieted her with a look. It said Do this, now, or. . . Anna didn’t wait for or; she closed her eyes and waited for Peru to affix the shades and the light skull-frame. Anna heard the small power surge right before Peru hit “Play”.

  Though Anna’s eyes remained closed behind the shades, she saw the trees just outside the motel. She recognized the water fixture near the parking lot and the front door of their own room as the perspective shifted to look behind her. The visual perspective was incredibly fluid. Anna had had to jack in a few times to learn how to make better reals—to look more slowly, to shut out her own thoughts as much as possible, to be in the moment. Both she and Peru excelled at the work because of what must have been heightened sensitivity. All their customers had come back for more because of the power of their reals.

  Experiencing Peru’s perspective, Anna understood the attraction: the other woman’s senses exuded an intensity that felt more powerful than her own because nothing seemed dulled. As the real’s perspective moved into the more populated portions of the town, she saw the world with a newness that felt like pleasure—a completeness Anna didn’t think she was still capable of feeling. The sky seemed brighter, smells more complex. Peru’s senses took nothing for granted and fully absorbed her environment, before categorizing it, dismissing it—if they ever dismissed it at all. Her perspective almost suspended time as each sensation was devoured and cast aside for the next.

  Even with all this Anna keenly felt another difference: Peru’s thoughts weren’t removed from this real, nor were her feelings or her fears. Underneath the newness, Peru felt oddly disconnected. Her gaze settled on a tree for the same amount of time as a person—man or woman, near or far, speaking to her or not. Not only that, but she felt the same way about all of them—nothing received special attention or a second look. Almost as if Peru had no reaction to the world at all because the reaction to everything was the same—an unrelenting fascination.

  Anna followed Peru’s perspective as she walked around to the motel they were staying in. She skirted the front door and went around to the bathroom window. She tried to peer in, but the plexi was shaded. She went round to the other side and looked into the kitchenette where Anna came into view sitting on the living room couch. Seeing herself unnerved her and only with a conscious effort did she keep the shades on.

  Once her own panic passed she felt odd sensations. Waves of emotion hit her, but she could not sort them out. Apprehension, longing, rage, attachment. Nothing quite like love or heavy as hate when Peru looked at Anna, but it lay weighty and full—just beyond her recognition. Everything she felt, she only seemed to feel at Anna. And it seemed to her it made Peru as uncomfortable as the thought of it made her. The past-tense Anna, the one who Peru watched, stood and crossed the room to the window. She pulled the shade back a few centimeters, no doubt looking for Peru. Anna remembered that she had been wondering if Peru would come bac
k. Anna felt longing in her chest, not sure if the feeling were hers or Peru’s.

  Peru’s perspective walked into the woods that surrounded the motel, her gaze trained on the ground. Not far from the motel room where they were staying, she stopped and dropped down. The real’s perspective lowered and settled on a tiny white skeleton partially obscured by tufts of grass. Anna couldn’t tell what it had been—perhaps a newt or gecko. Peru closed her hand around the skeleton, and Anna began to feel uneasy. When Peru opened her hand, a light brown lizard scurried off of it.

  A bolt of panic shot through Anna.

  The real went black.

  “Peru, you can’t show your gift. They’ll find—” Anna began, pulling off the shades.

  She saw an empty room. She looked behind her, into the bathroom. Peru’s toiletries were missing. As her gaze traveled around the room she saw that Peru’s clothes had been taken from the closet; the bag with all her virtu gear no longer sat at the foot of the bed; even the food that had been on the counter was no longer there.

  Peru had left nothing but Anna behind.

  

  Now, as Anna sat at home in the giene spa, sketching with her back against the tub, the cygnets kept her company. The bag and coat she’d worn to The Dire were tumbling through the dry cycle in the other room. Every few seconds the sound of her belt hitting the side of the dryer rang out.

  Anna drew a nearly perfect oval, indiscernible from any other oval, but one that she knew was an egg, even before she sketched the nest, the thin branch, a patch of cloud behind it. As she finished the rounded edge of a distant leaf, the egg started to rise from the paper. Anna cupped her hands around the space and cradled it as it finished emerging. The egg felt fragile in her hands, as if a breath could crack it.

  She placed the egg in her lap and looked around the room for some place to rest it, not wanting to move. There was nothing. Anna removed her shirt and shaped it into a makeshift nest. The tub’s cold pricked her skin as she brushed against it, leaning over to place the nest next to her. She placed the egg inside the nest.

  Anna scooted her back down the tub’s porcelain, starting at each touch of cold. She leaned her head back until it touched the lip of the tub. Letting her gaze drift to the side, she watched the cygnets floating serenely, but from the smell, she knew the tub would have to be cleaned again soon. It must have set off a sensor in the lights; they glowed more brightly than usual, hurting her eyes when she looked up. Squinting, Anna looked back down at the floor where the egg sat in the T-shirt nest next to her.

  She should make a package to replace the parcels she’d left behind at the club. She still had a fountain pen and digi of king music she hadn’t sent. For the first time, she wondered why. In all the years she’d been trying to contact Peru she’d only ever received one response: “There’s nothing to say.” So Anna had stopped trying to say anything, and began sending the packages. They weren’t gifts. She thought certainly they were the only thing Peru might understand, their only chance at communication. After all, Peru had taught her about the power of objects.

  She abandoned her sketch pad and went out to the living room.

  Anna stood alone, shirtless, in the dim lights of her darkened apartment. She hoped that the package she sent would be a tool and work its magic. After she loaded the items into the box, she carefully drew three small green stars on the top right corner and initialed it as she always did.

  9

  The McClaren dead end had led Eugenio back to his careworn station at the archives of the City Health Department. After he left The Spires, he’d briefly considered doing a follow-up interview with Dr. Etive, but without any new information there was no point. He had to be missing something. He had no alternative but to go back over the files and broaden his perspective.

  He loaded up the city reports and files from December thirtieth. Resigned, Eugenio sighed and began slowly scrolling through City Health’s official report. He began to recite it by heart within a few sentences and stopped. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he closed his eyes and looked down at the polished table in front of him. The place smelled of stale air and boredom.

  Every city report would be this way, Eugenio knew; he feared that every document in the archives that related to the Crumble might be. He’d spent not just the four years of his professional life researching the topic, but both his public health and anthropology academic careers were centered on some aspect. His familiarity, Eugenio knew, could be his downfall. His mind followed along the same overused tracks, and though his interviews inspired him to look at new parts of the terrain, the country was still too familiar. He’d have to try something else.

  Frustrated, he took out his tablet to link up to the Net. He hoped some free-associative phrase searches would help him come up with some new tactics. The screensaver was the view of a particular peak he and Lucine had summited last year. He smiled at the memory of Lucine chastising him for using the word.

  “We climbed a hill, Eu. That’s all. No reason to make up words.”

  “But a picture is worth a thousand words,” he’d replied. He’d come across the phrase in a twenty-first-century lit course and it’d stuck with him. He repeated it again, under his breath, smiling at the memory.

  “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

  Eugenio laid the tablet back down on the desk and turned back to the reader.

  “Open images, labeled ‘Crumble’, ‘epidemic’, ‘quarantine’. ICDC quarantine period. Slideshow.”

  Visual horrors paraded before his eyes. Without thinking he began to chew the tip of his index finger. One of the images was an iconic one from that time. He’d seen it dozens of times—in his own schoolbooks and specials on national broadcasts. In it, a young girl stands next to a body, with a vulture perched where the head should be, its beak half into what had once been a face. The girl wails, horrified and frozen. Looking at it, the skin on Eugenio’s arms began to tingle and a swell of anxiety rose from the pit of his stomach up through his diaphragm. His vision began to tunnel.

  Eugenio closed the file and tried to take a deep breath. Not again: it had been at least a year since the last attack and its return wasn’t welcomed. He thought the exposure treatments had been working—though he only exposed himself to photos, but something about the brutality of that particular image triggered all the old fears.

  He reopened the image, and immediately felt nauseated. He made himself go to the next image and the next, his finger hovering over the “next” button, clicking through as his discomfort ratcheted up. There: a murder of crows perched just above a group of people sleeping in the Gardens. At least he hoped they were sleeping. Again: another group of birds indifferent to the man curled up on the ground. In another, a flock of white-headed pigeons feasting on a fruit cart while meters away an elderly woman reaches out.

  Eugenio’s disgust began to turn to something hard and cold as he continued to review the images. He hit the pause button hard enough to make an audible thunk.

  An unmistakable anger seethed in him—and only with a conscious effort did he stand up and walk away from the reader, seeking some distraction. He walked to the row of windows across the room and looked out on the fountain below. Near it, a tree was being devoured by what looked to be tens of thousands of caterpillars. Eugenio turned away from the sight in revulsion.

  His reactions seemed to be out of his control. Looking at the images, he hadn’t become desensitized as he should have with the exposure. In fact, it seemed to have the opposite effect. Instead of fear he felt anger; even now an irrational part of him wished he saw birds at the fountain below, birds that from this distance and angle would be easy to eliminate. Eugenio stopped in mid-thought. What if this wasn’t just his reaction; what if this was a common one? He’d thought before that the birds had been blamed because they were an easy culprit, a common enough vector for disease, but perhaps it had been as much revenge as lack of scientific rigor. Still—

  He hurried back to
the desk and picked up his tablet, linking in to the Net even before he sat down. Immediately he sought out the World Health site. The page wouldn’t load. He went back in through a different network. The page stayed frozen on an error message. He’d thought the issue had been his weak network at home, but perhaps not. He tried to come in through the hardline, but still had no luck. He needed a sat link, and knew where to find the closest one. Quickly, Eugenio packed up his things and dialed up a trans to take him downriver to Meta, the closest Mendejano outpost.

  

  The October that Eugenio met Lucine the river had swelled to levels not seen since his grandparents’ time. Standing on the bank nearest campus, Eugenio, fresh from a run, looked out over the river wondering how long the journey to its mouth would take. He had three weeks of fall break to conduct his research, but flooding would all but cancel his trip. He’d been checking the weather reports. All agreed that flooding was possible but not probable. With this scant comfort Eugenio boarded the fully automatic river winder his family had subsidized and checked back over his supplies, confirming that the boat was fully stocked.

  He’d be interviewing residents in traditional communities along the river coast about their attitudes towards time-delayed communication and estrangement during travel to and from outlying colonies, as well as its effect on kinship groups and sense of cultural identity. He might pursue the topic for his dissertation; so this was his dry run. But just as importantly he would be in the jungle, surrounded by birds. He’d bitten his nails down to the nub at the thought and endured a bout of prelaunch hyperventilating but Eugenio had determined that the time to conquer his fear had come.

  He could never be a decent medical anthropologist if the sound of birds set his teeth on edge. This was the secret goal of his trip. No one would accompany him on his cognitive therapy. He could and would fix himself and then he would go on to fix others. Eugenio broke a ceremonial bottle of rum against the bow of the ship and pressed a single blue button on his remote that gave his fate over to the boat. He stayed out on deck and looked eagerly into the distance squinting toward his certain and illustrious future.