“Were you able…?” Cara said. Then, “Did you fix it?”
The dog with the drone came forward, lifting its head toward her. She took the drone, and the dog let it go. It was her mother’s drone, there was no question about that. And the section she’d shattered was intact, but it looked different. The shards and splinters of its carapace were there, but a lattice of silver-white made a tracework where the breaks had been. Like a scar that marked a healed wound. There was no way her mother would fail to notice that. But it wouldn’t matter, as long as it worked. She put the drone down on the clover, slaved it to her handheld. The thrusters hummed. The drone rose into the air, solid and balanced as ever. Cara felt the grin in her cheeks.
“This is perfect,” she said. “This is everything. Thank you so much.”
The dogs looked embarrassed. She powered down the drone and wrapped it carefully in her jacket as they turned and walked back into the dimness under the trees. She wondered where they went when they weren’t at the pond. If there was some cave they slept in or a pod where they curled up at night. She had a hard time picturing that. And it wasn’t as if they had real mouths to eat with. Maybe they all went to some kind of alien power jack and filled up whatever they used as batteries.
“Thank you,” she shouted again into the shadows. She stood, holding the drone to her chest like it was a baby. “If there’s anything I can do for you…”
She didn’t finish the sentence.
She walked back home quickly, her steps quickened by the prospect of being home, of sneaking the drone into her room unseen. She’d have to be clever to get it back into its case without her parents knowing she’d taken it. There were two ways into the house—the front that faced the road to town, and the back by the garden and the shed. The question was which would be most likely to get her past her family’s watchful eyes and safely into her room. It was getting close to dinnertime, so the front would probably be best, since at least one of them would be in the kitchen. Or she could stow the drone in the shed under the cart and wait until everyone was asleep. That probably made more sense…
She knew something was wrong the moment she stepped in the back door. The air felt different, like the moment before a storm. Soft voices she didn’t recognize came from the living room. She walked toward them with a sense of entering a nightmare.
Her father was sitting on a chair; his face had literally turned gray. A uniformed soldier stood beside him, head bowed, and Santiago Singh was behind them, looking away. The boy’s eyes were puffy and red from crying. No one turned to her. It was like she was invisible.
Her mother walked in from the front door, footsteps hard and percussive. Her mouth was tight and her eyes as hard as rage. She gazed toward Cara without seeming to see her.
“Mom?” Cara said, and her voice seemed to come from a long way away. “What’s wrong?”
*
It was one of those things. An accident. If any of a thousand details had been just a little different, no one would have even noticed it. The soldier who’d been driving the transport had indulged in a couple beers with his lunch, so his reaction times were just that much delayed. Xan and Santiago and the other boys had decided to play football instead of tag, so there was a ball that could take a wild kick. Xan had been nearest the road, so he’d been the one to run out to retrieve it. The whole thing was over before anyone understood it had begun. Like that, her little brother was dead, and the drone and Momma bird and the dogs didn’t seem important anymore.
Cara sat while the soldier explained it all. Santiago Singh stood at attention, weeping as he retold all he’d seen like the good little soldier he was. Her father lurched out of the room at some point. Her mother dropped her favorite serving bowl, the fragments scattering across the floor. They were like moments out of a dream, connected because they were about the same thing, more or less. But she couldn’t have said which happened first. Which one led to the others. Xan was dead, and it shattered time for her. It broke everything.
Admiral Duarte sent his condolences. This was a lapse of discipline that should never have happened. The admiral had already ordered the drunk soldier’s execution. Cara’s family would be put first on the list for a place in the new housing facilities, and Cara would be guaranteed a place in the academy when it opened. The admiral understood that nothing could compensate for their loss, but the soldiers would do what they could. With the family’s permission, the admiral would like to attend the wake. Someone had said, Of course, but Cara didn’t know if it had been her mother or her father. She might even have said it herself.
The town didn’t have a mortuary. In the years they’d been on Laconia, there hadn’t been more than a handful of deaths, and none of them had been a child. Not until now. No one seemed to know what to do or how to go about it. Cara had never been to a funeral before. She didn’t know what to expect.
They brought Xan home that afternoon, and his body had already been cleaned. Someone had found or made a burial gown for him, white cloth from his throat down to his bare feet. They put him in the front between the door and road on a table. His eyes were closed, his hands folded on his belly. Cara stood at his side, looking down at him and trying to feel. Everything in her seemed to have gone numb.
To her, Xan looked like he was sleeping. Then he looked like he wasn’t really Xan, but only a statue of him. A piece of art. Cara found she could flip her brain between seeing him one way and then the other, like he’d become an optical illusion. Her brother, but only asleep. Something not alive, but also not her brother. Back again. Anything except the two together: Never both Xan and dead.
People from town came. Edmund Otero. Janet Li. The Stover family, with Julianne Stover carrying her new baby on one hip. They brought food. A couple of times, they tried singing hymns, but the songs died out before they could really take root. At one point, Mari Tennanbaum seemed to well up out of the crowd and grab Cara in an awkward hug, like Cara was supposed to be comforting her instead of the other way around. Then Mari faded back into the swirl of bodies and hushed conversation. Cara went back to looking at her brother’s corpse.