Blood Colony (18 page)

Fana tried to make herself float the way she vaguely remembered from when she was very young. She could almost remember touching a cloud with her mind, coaxing rain. And if she could touch a cloud, how much farther could she travel? Teka had told her that Khaldun could send his thoughts across miles and see events across the ocean. Even the future! Teka thought she had that power, too. Only with stillness, he said, would she find it again.

Had she found it when she’d broken the camera at McDonald’s?

Fana didn’t think so. She’d only had a fearful impulse, just like when she was three, and what good was a gift she couldn’t control?

As Fana felt her warm blood emptying into the bag in her palm, she tried to be still. To see Aunt Alex. Caitlin’s father. Or Teka! Was Teka meditating now? Could they reach each other in the place where dreams meet?

YOUR GIFTS IN THEMSELVES ARE NOTHING TO FEAR.

Teka’s voice came alive. Was he talking to her now, or was it only a memory?

ONLY IN STILLNESS CAN YOU BE CERTAIN THAT THE POWER YOU WIELD IS YOURS AND YOUR CREATOR’S ALONE. ONLY IN STILLNESS WILL YOUR PUREST GIFTS MANIFEST.

When Fana imagined the woods, the colony, she thought she felt Aunt Alex’s sleeping mind, waiting to be released from its last moment of surprise and fear. And Justin O’Neal…changed somehow. But alive. The impressions were so faint that they might exist only in her imagination. Teka said she could regain her childhood gifts and more, but even now, when she needed her gifts the most, they were hidden from her. Fana breathed slowly, searching for stillness within the house’s havoc and her own doubts.

Can you hear me, Teka? There are others like us, and they mean us harm. Warn your Brothers to protect the colony. Warn my mother and father.

Silence taunted Fana. A white shroud of nothingness.

Then a thought crashed into Fana with such power that her breath caught, trapped in her throat. Her eyes flew open from a ringing inside her ears that was so loud she expected Caitlin to look at her as if she’d heard it, too. But Caitlin was still kneeling, scouring the floor for blood.

The thought was like none Fana could remember, yet it felt like a current carrying her somewhere she had been once, long ago. It filled Fana with a terror she had no name for.

Four words, unmistakable, in an unhuman voice she did not know.

AND BLOOD TOUCHETH BLOOD.

“So, wait…,” Charlie said, exhaling sweetly scented clove cigarette smoke from the corner of his mouth. He lowered his chin and gazed at Fana with unblinking dark eyes, hugging a pool cue to his chest as he leaned against the patio wall. “Explain to me how someone survives seventeen years of life without ever playing pool.”

“Where I live, it’s quiet,” Fana said. “No pool table.”

“And where’s that?”

An innocent question, but one Fana could never answer. Not for anyone. Even someone with fascinating, tight locks of raven hair spilling across his brow, resting above two lush eyebrows and lashes almost too long for a boy. Not even someone whose skin was dark bronze, or who was wearing tattered jeans revealing a patch of his thigh, tight enough to beg her eyes to examine the stitching more closely.

“A quiet place,” Fana said with a coy smile. “There are a lot of things I’ve never done.” Her daring shocked her. Pleased her. She had never witnessed this side of herself. Charlie brought out aspects of her she could hardly believe.

Only two hours ago, she’d been in bed again, where she’d been nearly all day trying to fight off the unsettled, claustrophobic feeling that had haunted her in the bathroom. She’d talked herself out of bed because she didn’t want Charlie to think she was an invalid. If he was really leaving in the morning, why waste the few hours they had left? Already, it was almost dinnertime. The scent of Sheila Rolfson’s vegetarian gumbo on the stove seeped onto the patio through the family room’s open glass sliding door.

Across the patio, Johnny cleared his throat. He pretended to be ignoring them, studying the plants, but his attention rarely left them. Johnny was like her cousin Jared and Fasilidas in the woods. A guardian. “Where she lives is quiet, all right,” Johnny said with exaggerated familiarity, striding toward them. “Beautiful, too, right, Bea-Bea? Her parents are awesome.”

Charlie smirked. “If it’s so awesome, what’s she doing here?”

Fana felt her face flush. A lifetime of being ignored by the opposite sex, and now she had two boys hovering over her! Three, if she counted the shy approaches of Nate, who had never been more than a few yards from her since she’d come upstairs from the basement.

Balls clicked on the pool table. Nate was bent over, already posed for his next shot, one eye closed, the other staring down the brown ball teetering at the edge of the corner pocket. Nate was a fast and sure player. When he gave Fana a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure she was watching, Fana realized he was showing off for her.

Nate and Charlie were both good players, so they each had long turns. Charlie took advantage of his lulls to sidle beside Fana. Every time Charlie came within a couple feet, as he was now, Fana felt the strangest gentle burning sensation across whichever arm was closest to him. At first, she’d mistaken the feeling for another ailment after her sudden trip. But the condition only got worse each time he came near. And it wasn’t unpleasant. Not at all.

So this is what it feels like when your skin wants to touch someone else’s,
she thought.

Charlie squashed out the last of his cigarette in the ashtray he’d made from a soda can. “Maybe I should ask the lady herself,” Charlie said, his eyes back on Fana’s. He shifted position suddenly, a hair closer, and her arm sizzled again. His faint accent was heavenly. “What would make you leave a quiet, beautiful place to live like this?”

“I believe in Glow,” Fana said. “I believe in what it can do for humankind.”

“And you’re not afraid?”

“Of course I am,” she said. “We all are—even you. But like you, I won’t give in to fear.”

Johnny was not only saddled with fear but he also felt deep shame because of it. Aunt Alex had been Fana’s first mistake, and maybe Johnny had been her second. He would have gotten hurt at Berkeley—Fana had no doubt—but she wished they had thought of another way to help him. Johnny felt the most alone of any of them, without any tribe.

Nate took his shot, and the white ball went wild, jumping to the floor. He turned to walk up to her so fast that Fana wondered if he had missed the shot on purpose.

“I’ve got a story,” Nate said. It was the first sentence he’d spoken to her all day. Nate waited for Charlie to leave her side, then he leaned against the wall in Charlie’s place before going on. The sizzling feeling died.

Nate went on. “When we lived in New York, there was this kid at my dad’s school whose car crashed. The valedictorian, right? He’d been in a bunch of my dad’s classes, really smart. It was this huge tragedy, because he was in a coma and wouldn’t wake up. My dad was really down about it. So one day he talks to Caitlin…”

Nate suddenly had Johnny’s attention, too. Nate only had to utter Caitlin’s name.

“Caitlin went to the hospital with my dad to see this kid. They waited until they were alone, and”—he mimicked the motion of pressing the plunger of a hypodermic needle—“bam. He’s awake. Now that kid’s at West Point. That’s my Glow story.”

“I have a story just like that,” Fana said quietly, smiling at him. “My cousin.”

Jared had been in a coma when Mom had gone to him in Florida and brought him blood. Fana could almost remember talking to Jared even before she’d met him, in his sleep. They had been destined to become family; they had known each other before they’d met.

Like her and Charlie, maybe.

“AIDS is the big one for me,” Charlie said, studying the landscape of the pool table. He settled on the green ball Nate hadn’t sunk, readying his cue. He turned the cue over in his hands, fondling it like a friend. Fana noticed how wide his palms were, how long and slender his fingers. “It blasts the shit out of AIDS. That’s why we call it Blast, and that’s why the government wants to ban it. So we’ll stay sick. So we’ll stay poor while the rich party on.”

Charlie didn’t say it, but Fana suddenly realized that Chalie had been diagnosed with HIV when he was fourteen. He had tried shooting heroin only once and had been infected by a friend’s needle, contracting the resistant strain pills didn’t help. Last year, he’d met Ethan at his high school, and Ethan had told him about Glow. Ethan had saved his life, and now Ethan was dead, murdered.

Fana knew without trying; the story was practically on Charlie’s lips.

“What about sickle-cell?” Johnny said.

Fana nodded. “Thousands of people have been cured of sickle cell in Africa. AIDS, too. It works best on blood diseases.” She almost blurted out
Because it’s blood,
but she stopped in time.

“I have a friend with sickle-cell,” Johnny said. “I want to get him Glow.”

Fana smiled. “He’ll have it. We just need a little time, Johnny. I promise.”

No need to touch Johnny, or give his mind a massage; her words alone made his face lose a layer of anxiety, replaced by something like rapture. He believed her.
Omari
. That was his friend’s name. Just like that, Johnny found his peace. To him, whatever he was going through was worth it if he could help Omari.

“Yeah, Glow’s worth fighting for,” Charlie said. He took his shot, and the green ball dropped as smoothly as if he’d blown it in with his breath. “But there’s still The Big Question…”

“What’s The Big Question?” Johnny said.

Charlie turned to scowl at him. “What do you think?”

“Where does it come from?” Johnny guessed.

“
Exactamente,
” Charlie said. “I have a theory. Ready to hear it?”

Fana nearly squirmed. Her ears burned, and not in the pleasant way.

“Scientist revolutionaries,” Charlie said. “They probably work for the U.S. government, which had the cures all along. So now these guys are giving it away to the masses. As my man Che Guevara would say,
Viva la revolución
.”

He sounded like Caitlin, except that Caitlin knew the truth.

“Yeah, that’s what my dad would say,” Nate said. “But check it: What if it’s like a care package from an alien civilization? They’re sharing their advancements with us, but they don’t want us to know they’re here.”

“Why not?” Charlie said, giving Fana a private glance. Humoring Nate.

“Simple,” Nate said. “If we knew, we’d destroy them.”

“But you said they’re helping us,” Charlie said.

“Haven’t you ever seen any sci fi movies?” Nate said. “
The Day the Earth Stood Still
? Come on. Welcome to Earth—POW. The aliens always bite it, whether they’re helping us or not.”

Fana felt herself trying to sink into the patio’s tiled floor. She was desperate to change the subject but didn’t dare. Her voice might give away how close to home their musings had drifted.

Charlie laughed. “I’ve seen some movies where the aliens did all right,” he said. With hardly a thought, he sank a red ball with an elegant shot. He nodded toward Johnny. “How ’bout you, college boy? Where does Glow come from?”

Johnny was controlling his nerves by tying and retying his sneaker, one foot propped on a patio chair. “There’s a long answer and a short answer,” he said. “The long answer explains the how. Who’s making it? When did it start? What are its components? We’ll find out one day, but no one knows yet. Not for sure. But I know the short answer.”

“What’s the short answer?” Nate said.

“Simple,” John said and glanced skyward. “From God.”

Fana’s arms quivered again, but in a different way entirely. No one argued or joked. Even Charlie reached over to pound Johnny’s fist, making Johnny grin for the first time all day.

By the time Caitlin came and told them dinner was ready, something had changed. The worries in the house had gone nearly silent. Charlie and Johnny rushed toward the dinner table, talking like old friends as Charlie explained how powerful Johnny would feel the first time he realized he had cured his friend’s disease.

Nate lingered last, beside Fana. He gently took her arm. When she looked at him, his eyes widened slightly. Nate seemed to have forgotten what he was going to say.

“I…like your dreads.” His words were nearly garbled beneath heavy breaths.

Fana smiled. “Thanks. I’ve had dreadlocks almost my whole life.”

“Sorry if this is bad to ask, but…can I touch one?”

“Sure,” Fana said, not hesitating. When she was growing up in Botswana, she remembered being baffled by the sight of a white boy with freckles at an airport. Maybe Nate had never known anyone with dreadlocks.

With care, Nate rubbed the end of one of Fana’s dreadlocks between his fingertips, gently tracing the patterns woven in her hair. With his pug nose and clear braces, Nate reminded her of the curious child she had been.

“Thanks for putting up with that,” Nate said, resting Fana’s hair across her shoulder with both hands, as if it were a sleeping snake. “My mom said I might offend you if I asked.”