Adri couldn’t believe it; that was eleven days away. Why so long? She had rushed here just to hurry up and wait. She wondered how she’d survive the boredom.
The box contained a bunch of small items for her to get used to: a wearable translation filter, a Pixo containing the profiles of the other Colonists on her team . . . Adri sifted through them, and then sitting back, at a loss for what to do with herself, she turned on the TV. They were talking politics about carbon capture locations in the South China Sea. Her eyes kept going to the barn lot beyond the windows, out to where she’d been walking that morning.
Lily came back inside a few minutes later, and as she stood in the kitchen tidying up, Adri came to stand in the doorway to watch her. Inexplicably she dumped everything in the trash instead of the Cyclo-bin that stood right beside it.
“Hey, Lily?” she said. “Do you know how old that tortoise is? Galapagos?”
Lily cast a glance over her shoulder. “Old as sin. They live up to a century and a half supposedly, and I’d say she’s probably pushing that.”
For a moment, Adri wondered whether or not to admit she’d been snooping in Lily’s box of mementos upstairs, but curiosity got the best of her.
“Last night I was looking around in my room and I found some old photos and mementos and stuff. There’s a postcard. From someone named Lenore to someone named Beth. From 1920. It mentions Galapagos—it makes it sound like she was really important—like this person was coming all this way to deliver her. Do you think it’s the same Galapagos?”
Lily looked up, intrigued, as she wiped down the sink. “Must be. She came with the house when my mother moved in, a lifetime ago. Along with the books, furniture . . . everything. The family that lived here, it was like they just . . . disappeared, barely took a thing with them—or at least that’s how it seemed growing up.” Lily fiddled with the tap, which was leaking. “My mother said they were family, but I never asked her about it, just didn’t think much about it. Now that we’ve got no family left, I wish I had. They were Gottliebs or Godfreeds or something.” She finally got the tap fixed and turned. “My mind . . .” She tapped her forehead and then smiled sadly.
Adri waited for her to elaborate.
“I’ve got dementia.” Lily leaned back against the counter. “The other day I forgot, for a little while, that I was old. Isn’t that crazy? I thought I was in my twenties and that I was looking for a job, and then I was like, oh wait a second, I retired twenty years ago.” She barked out a laugh. “They say I’ll start forgetting who’s dead and who’s alive.” Her smile faded.
“I’m sorry, Lily,” Adri said.
“It’s the way it goes, I guess. They’ve got concrete that heals itself and all these diseases licked, but some things still get left behind in the dust. Just my luck.” Lily looked thoughtful. “My mother had this stack of letters, about those people or from them or something—dug up when she was cleaning things out. I remember seeing her reading them on the couch a couple times, very absorbed. But I’d bet she threw them away. She was never a sentimental person.”
She sighed. “It’d be nice to know why they mattered to her,” she said. “How they were related to us. It’d be nice if I weren’t the last Ortiz on earth, after you leave. Some family all the records missed.”
They sat in silence for a while.
“You were already the last one in our family,” Adri offered. “Before you knew about me, and that wasn’t so bad.”
“Oh,” Lily shrugged. “I always knew about you. I did a DNA search years ago, and you’re the only one who turned up.”
Adri was taken by surprise. It made her bristle, that she’d been left in the dark. But it wasn’t like she would have reached out to Lily if the knowledge had been reversed.
“Do you know Galapagos tortoises are endangered?” she said. “It’s illegal for them to be pets.”
Lily studied her for a second, then smiled. “We should have her arrested.” She flashed a mischievous smile. “You wanna watch TV?” she asked. “There’s gonna be a segment on a little girl who died and went to heaven for five minutes.”
Adri couldn’t imagine anything she’d less like to see. “How far is town?” she asked.
“Less than a mile. I could take you.”
There was longing in her voice, but Adri ignored it. “I’m gonna go for a run.”
At first there was nothing but farmland on either side of her—wheat fields and empty pastures with no houses in sight. After about two miles she passed an abandoned convenience store with windows missing and a rusting gas stand out front. But there were also signs of life: a metal sign announcing that the street had been adopted by the Rotary Club, a car-charging station, a distant ad balloon floating through the sky advertising Band-Aids. Within a mile she was passing little houses and then brick storefronts. Turning onto Main Street, she passed a grocery store that looked fairly decent, then a thrift store, a town hall, and a sanitation office. Otherwise Canaan was empty. Past town, fields of buffalo grass stretched along the side of the road and out toward the horizon.
No wonder Lily was so desperate for signs of life. She wasn’t kidding when she’d said the town was dead. She was essentially all alone.
That night, after Lily had gone to bed, Adri did a cursory search around the house for the letters Lily had mentioned, but nothing turned up. She pulled out the postcard again and read it. It was mysterious, the disappearance of the family, the idea that they might be related to Lily and Adri, the turtle as a mighty gift . . . one girl asking another: Will you be waiting for me? Will you love her as much as I do? The words struck her as all wrong. What was so important about a tortoise that a person would cross the ocean to deliver her? What kind of person would love a tortoise that much?
Outside her window, the moon was rising. There were astronomical observatories there now, too small and distant to see. She tried to picture her new future.
As people on whom the future depended, Colonists had access to astronomically expensive, government-controlled nanotherapies that were only available to a select few. These therapies meant a Colonist’s life might go on an extremely long time. Adri looked down at her hands, trying to imagine living a century and a half, and even longer than that.
Of all the things that Adri had tried to get her head around in the past week, this was the hardest. What would living for hundreds of years be like? Did she even want to live that long? She gazed out the window and tried to picture it; she looked at her hands and tried to imagine them as three-hundred-, four-hundred-, or thousand-year-old hands.
Suddenly she realized what it was that had felt so off about the room since she’d arrived. In all her sixteen years in Miami, she’d always been able to hear the faint sound of waves and the motorboats headed across the water. She’d never slept more than a mile away from the ocean.
CHAPTER 3