Fade Away and Radiate (2 page)

The lump in Anika's throat all but
choked her. She shrugged and tried to laugh. “I always warned him
to watch his back. Doing our kind of research is so dangerous.
Rival corporations will kill scientists, kidnap them and extract
their knowledge. And Roberto put himself outside of FortuneCorp's
protection, going to war. But he wanted to understand what it was
like to undergo genetic modification himself, and the only way to
find out was to become a soldier. Like you.”

“
Roberto didn't fool nobody.
I figured out after a while that he was a scientist, not a
grunt.”

“
Ah, yes. He told you his
motto? ‘Geneticist, modify yourself.’”

Billy grinned sadly at the memory, and
at Anika’s imitation of Roberto's Spanish-inflected voice. For a
moment, it was like Roberto was there with them, sharing the
joke.

Anika smiled, and Billy looked into her
soul again. But this time, his gaze felt more like a
caress.

“
I suppose a rival
corporation got Roberto. Espionage. That’s what I figured when I
heard he was gone.”

Billy stared at her for a long moment,
and then he withdrew his gaze, looked into the middle distance, his
open face suddenly unreadable. “After the memorial, I went back for
six more months.

“
Hard months, Annie. Hard,
hard months. The whole team died out there, one by one. The genmod
can help – infrared vision, limb regeneration – and it will keep
you alive in field, but the morale went bad.”

He shifted in his chair, and Billy
looked into the distance, like he saw the pictures drawn by his
words. She willed herself into complete silence. And Billy kept
telling her the secrets of his war.

“
Soldiers are superstitious,
modified or not. And after Roberto was murdered on the base, our
luck seemed to go with him. We knew some kind of bullshit was going
on, okay? But we had no way to prove it. I figured with his
scientist background, he made some bad enemies. Maybe he was even a
spy, yeah? We didn't know for sure.”

He leaned back in the chair and sighed.
And Anika trembled, only then realizing that she had been holding
her breath as he spoke.

“
I got the Murphy luck, ya
know. Bad luck that gets you to the other side every time. But the
other guys – their luck was just bad.”

“
I'm so sorry,” she
whispered, watching the pain play over Billy’s face like a shadow.
“It must have been awful.”

“
Worse for you,” he replied,
his eyes still closed. “I'm the luckiest man alive, to get out of
the Desert. But you think he died because of you.”

Anika took a huge gulp of air then, the
guilt twisting like a knife in her chest. It was true. Roberto died
because of the work they had done together.

Before she could say anything, Billy
opened his eyes and looked at her.

“
Everybody in a war feels
guilty for surviving, Annie. That's just part of the gig.” He
looked ordinary again, the smart-ass kid from Southie that he'd
once been, before he joined the Army to get the genmod. But that
street kid was gone forever too, and both of them knew
it.

“
It's funny,” he said. “You
run with a pack in the war and once those guys are gone, it's like
you're missing a limb.”

She nodded. That pain she knew all
about. Still felt it, every day.

“
I'll tell you how I tracked
you down,” he said. His voice was soft now, his Boston accent
faded. “My tour ended and I was a lone wolf. So I come back to the
Rotten Apple, and the first thing I do in New York is look you up,
like I promised you. And him.”

They exchanged a long, low glance, and
Anika knew he was thinking of the memorial, too. The things he'd
said to her. The way he’d sworn to protect her, the way he'd held
her in his arms as she cried. That was a long, long time ago
now.

“
But you were gone,” he
continued. “Six months after the memorial, and your house was all
locked up, I couldn't find you online. At first, I figured you was
dead too, and why not? So was everybody else. But you took care of
everything too neat. You disappeared too perfect.”

She'd tried like hell to stay away from
Billy. Because if a rival corporation had killed Roberto like she
suspected, then a rival corporation would likely want to kill her
too. After all, she and Roberto had worked as a scientific team.
She had told her FortuneCorp regional supervisor about her fears,
and they told her the matter was under investigation. But, like
Billy, she'd heard nothing more.

And that silence terrified her. Both
she and Roberto had done research on classified techniques for
human genetic modification and ecological re-engineering. Those
techniques were worth billions. Now that Roberto was dead, Anika
was the only one who could complete the research track they had
started together.

Anika ran offworld, all the way to
AlphaZed3, to escape the reach of any other corporation. Her new
technology, the Bowman eco-drive, would serve as a living legacy of
her husband’s vision. And Anika believed the remoteness of this
posting would protect her from deadly visitors.

Billy’s appearance put the lie to that
notion. She knew to her core that Billy would never hurt her, that
he had sworn to Roberto that he would protect her. But if Billy
could make it way out here, anybody could. And the blaster under
her pillow wouldn't save her.

The tears spilled over Anika’s cheeks,
onto her lips, tasting of regret and loss and fear. And loneliness,
such terrible aching loneliness, so deep that she didn't dare
surrender to it.

Billy got out of his chair and covered
the space between them in a couple of bounding steps. He kneeled
next to her low cot, and Billy was so tall that, even kneeling, his
eyes were level to hers.

They were only centimeters apart now.
Her breath caught in her throat.

Anika couldn’t care less about her
legacy now. All she could see in her mind was the wisteria, the
morning glories, and the snapdragons climbing the glass windows of
her bedroom in Forest Hills, where she had once said goodbye to
Roberto before he left for war for the last time.

“
You aren't safe out here,”
Billy said gently. His eyes flashed with the tears he never shed,
never. As he’d told her at the memorial, Billy Murphy didn't do
tears. The unshed tears in Billy’s eyes flashed silver into
midnight, lightning over a summer sea.

A rush of panic spread through Anika's
body. “I have to hide. You understand why.”

“
I know you believe it was a
rival corporation that murdered Roberto, to shut him up. To shut
down your research. But think about it, Annie. Why didn't they
murder you in New York?”

The question hovered in the air between
them. Billy's hands reached for her and caressed her shoulders. And
the shock of that touch roared through her like an ion storm. “I
told you, Annie, that I love you. The night of the memorial I knew.
And I told you. I knew it was too soon. You had to let him go, and
I told you I’d wait, as long as it took. I fell for you the second
I saw you. Roberto told me that I would.”

Anika tried to speak, but she couldn't
manage a word.

“
Wait up, hear me out. The
genmod does funny stuff, you know that. It gave Roberto some
precog, he knew when stuff was going to happen.”

Anika swiped the tears off her face, as
if she could wipe Billy's words away. His fingers tightened over
her shoulders, and she took a big, shuddering breath, fighting not
to let go, not to release her true feelings.

“
He had changed, by the
end,” she finally said. “Maybe it was the genmod. Or maybe it was
just the war.”

“
Roberto told me he was
going to die, the night before he was murdered. He told me he was
planning to speak out about the stuff he’d seen in the war. But it
was too late. And he told me I was going to save your life, just in
time. And here I am, before it’s too late, just like he
said.”

His arms slipped around her, protecting
her, and Anika melted into him. After two years of running away
from Roberto's killers, she'd finally turned around and faced the
past, the grief of not just losing Roberto, but Billy
too.

“
I'm safe out here, I
think,” she said, her voice muffled from inside Billy's arms. “As
long as I just do my work and don’t cause any trouble, I don't
think any other corporation can get through FortuneCorp's sectors.
FortuneCorp runs the whole show out here.”

“
It's not safe. It wasn’t
safe for Roberto, surrounded by his brothers. It’s not safe for
you, out here all alone. I came to get you out of here.”

Anika cried then, remembering. Billy
just held her, his silence saying so much more than words ever
could. The tears slipped away after a while, though she knew, like
the tides they’d return. They rolled in every night, as she
stretched out on her cot, her fingers touching the blaster for
courage.

But that time was done, now that Billy
was here. He could still leave in the morning. If she had her way,
he'd go when daylight came, free and alive. Free of his obligation
to her. But everything had changed because he had found her. Even
after he went back to his life, Anika would remember that he had
come.

“
One night,” Anika insisted.
“Stay the night and you’ll go in the morning. Just like I first
said. And as long as I stay here working, and as long as you don’t
poke the powers that be and just go your way, we should both be
okay.”

Billy’s smile flashed across his face,
banishing the shadows. “I got the Murphy's luck, Annie. Too late to
stay out of trouble, too late the day I was born. But I’m here.” He
knew as well as she did that a night could last forever, that
anything could happen between this moment they shared, and
daybreak.

#

Reunions are funny, time-bending
things. After only a few minutes more, Billy and Anika had
recovered from their emotion. Anika took Billy into the jungle, for
just a few minutes, to show him her artistry.

She beamed her arc-light torch skyward
and dappled shadows filtered through the broad leaves stretching
over their heads. “Those are tiny weeds back at home,” she
whispered. “My technology grows crabgrass into trees, clovers into
climbing vines. I grew this jungle in a single growing season. It
would take fifty years, a hundred, for any other
terraformer.”

Anika crouched down and dug around in
the sandy dirt until she found what she was looking for. She pulled
the black tube out of the ground to show Billy. “This is what the
trouble is all about,” she said. “The Bowman eco-drive.”

“
Could anybody just take it
and grow stuff?”

“
You need the expertise of
course. But if you had the secret of it…”

She left the rest unspoken. Such a
technological revolution was worth espionage, murder. To steal it,
to control it, or at least to stop it.

#

They shared their dinner, eating
picnic-style on the floor by the side of her bed, leaning against
it. Anika took a sip of protein gel. It didn't taste like much, but
it did the job of nourishing her. And all she cared about was
Billy, anyway. Getting as much of him as she could before he had to
go away again.

She was hungry for the human contact,
for the simple pleasure of talking to somebody. But it was more
than that. This was Billy, the man who populated her secret dreams
and kept her company in her memories. As Roberto faded away, Billy
became more vivid, and she held on to him like a talisman, like a
soldier’s good luck charm.

Never mind that he had the
Murphy-backwards luck he mentioned. She wanted all of him, that
lopsided smile, that incandescent stare that made the rest of the
universe disappear. It sounded idiotic, but she wanted to protect
him. And if she couldn't protect him by staying away from him, she
wanted to give him a place of sanctuary, where he could let go of
the banter, let go of the war, and find a peaceful garden to lay
his head.

But it wasn’t that simple.

Anika put these thoughts away. Here
with Billy, she was Annie, not Anika, and for the moment she could
leave the beleaguered scientist behind, and be Annie, Billy's girl,
at least for a single night.

“
So how did you get from the
Jobs Prize to planet AlphaZed3?”

She sighed and leaned back against the
cot, feeling the heat of his arm all along her side, even though
they didn't touch. “I don't know how I ended up here, really,” she
said, wrenching herself away from the tangled mess of her thoughts
to look at him, in the flesh, next to her. “But making this planet
habitable means big money for FortuneCorp,” she said.

“
You wanna to know how I
found you out here? I knew you and Roberto worked for FortuneCorp,
first off. And that aside from all your science, you love growing
things. So I thought to myself – ‘Self, what would a scientist who
loves growing things do for FortuneCorp?’ Grow new worlds, of
course. After that, I hacked into the employee database of
off-world employees and I was hot on your trail.”