Neptune's Tears Read online

  Halfway through her Krakatoa Mocha, she asked him how he’d come to be in her A&E room in the first place.

  ‘You have to promise not to laugh,’ he answered. ‘I was knocked out. By Nancy Drew. In the stacks at the library. An entire shelf of her fell on me. The originals, not the digitals.’

  Zee couldn’t help it. She laughed.

  He smiled too and brushed back a cowlick of dark hair. ‘Do you know how many Nancy Drew books there are? Over a thousand! I was practically buried alive.’

  ‘And that’s what you’re here studying? The literature you crossed half a galaxy for? I read Nancy Drew when I was ten.’

  ‘So did almost every Earth girl for the last three hundred years. It’s what you’ve all got in common.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘We think Nancy Drew may be the key to female dynamism in the universe.’

  That time they had both laughed.

  Zee found the tab on the duvet and reset it to let it float down onto her shoulders and body. That was what she wanted, that feeling of lightness and warmth near her, the feeling of being in the booth with David again. She wanted to make the feeling last. Because at the end, she’d felt an almost physical snap when he stood, breaking their connection. He hadn’t said anything about seeing her again; he hadn’t even walked her home. He’d said goodbye outside the café and vanished into the blur of London.

  Zee slept most of the day and the next morning put her name on the emergency availability list. She wasn’t due back at work until Tuesday, but she didn’t want to give herself more time to think about David either. No one had called in sick and she’d all but decided to go for a run when suddenly her handheld shrieked and all of her screens started to flash. The wall screen shimmered to life and began to feed her information. There’d been another anarchist attack, a shock bomb in Trafalgar Square, and the TBDs were being brought directly to Royal London Hospital.

  The swift pump of adrenalin flooded her veins. Zee still had her headset and track shoes on but was flying out the door before the hospital broadcasting system finished ticking through the details.

  The bombs had gone off fifteen minutes earlier, one near Nelson’s Column and the other across the square by the National Gallery. Nineteen dead at the scene. Twenty-four known injured. TBDs: four thousand, six hundred and fifty-four.

  That was the thing about low-grade shock bombs. They didn’t make noise or send up flames and smoke. Instead, an undetectable device the size of a dewdrop, activated by remote control, sent shockwaves skipping silently across a large area. The waves weren’t strong enough to break glass or bring down buildings. Usually, they didn’t even tear the skin. Instead, they passed through the skin to bruise, compress and tear at soft internal organs.

  No one knew who’d been hit and who hadn’t, not even the victims. Only a few died right away, usually children and the elderly. Some, often those closest to the device, were clearly and seriously hurt. Most people insisted they felt fine, unaware of the internal injuries that would kill them hours or weeks later, when damaged organs failed or tiny ruptures became infected. Hospital slang classified them as TBDs: patients to be diagnosed.

  In the three years since the first shock bomb went off in the middle of Paris, not a single bomb had been stopped and not a single bomber had been caught. Those responsible, a group of anarchists who demanded nothing short of a full return to nature and demolition of all cities and social structures, had no support and almost no money, yet they’d mastered a terrifying technology that killed thousands and overwhelmed hospitals wherever they struck. Taking down hospitals was important to the anarchists, who argued that man interfered with natural selection, putting human survival ahead of other animals. Only when balance is restored can Earth be free was one of the anarchists’ many mottoes.

  Zee reached the A&E entrance with the first wave of ambulances. This was the third shock bomb attack she’d worked and she knew the drill. First hurry to suit up, then attach the sensors to the shaved spots high on the nape of her neck, make sure her hair covered them and check the master screen to make sure she was logged in and her brain waves were registering. Hospitals were still developing protocol to deal with shock bombs, and so far empaths were the most promising way forward. Not only were there not enough thermal scanners to handle the high volume of patients, the scanners were incapable of picking up the pinprick damage that could trigger a long, slow death. Empaths had so far been more accurate at triaging patients, separating those who needed immediate care from those who did not. The sensors attached to Zee’s skin would monitor her brain activity over the next several hours. Ultimately, it would be mapped and translated into patterns and thoughts that would give researchers a far better idea than Zee herself could have given of the hundreds of unvoiced factors that ended in a decision. The final result, researchers hoped, would help train others throughout the world.

  The A&E floor was chaos. Because there weren’t enough ambulances to handle the flow, hundreds of TBDs came in on their own, while hundreds more were brought by citizens who’d turned out to help. The room was already overflowing, spilling into corridors and leaving a huge crowd outside. Zee saw they were going to have the same problem they’d had last time – telling the TBDs from everyone else. Then she saw Rani swing through the doors with boxes of red, blue and green glomarkers. She put several of each in Zee’s pocket.

  ‘Mark on the forehead,’ she said, handing out pens to every empath she could reach. ‘Green for the helper, red for TBDs who need to be seen immediately, one blue line for non-urgent TBDs and two blue lines for anyone who can wait longer still.’

  ‘They’ll resist,’ Zee warned, remembering last time, when TBDs went into denial and ripped off the coloured paper armbands they’d used.

  ‘Do it fast,’ Rani advised, ‘and tell them it will wash off.’

  ‘Will it?’

  ‘In about two weeks.’ Rani grinned and vanished into the crowd.

  Zee spent the next hours under combat conditions. There was no quiet place to be, no way to calm patients who were in shock, who convinced themselves that they were fine and could go home and block out everything that had happened. Children were the easiest to work with, especially when she told them she was going to draw a glowing red or blue star on their foreheads. But adults resisted, their bodies hard with fear and closed to her.

  She triaged patients as fast as she could, suppressing the constant worry that she was making bad decisions, missing things that could cost someone’s life. All of the empaths had come in for the emergency, and most of them probably felt the same way she did. Zee saw the head of the department and almost all the teaching and training staff in the crowd. Once, as she hesitated over a diagnosis, her adviser came up to her and pulled her gently aside. ‘I know it’s hard,’ she said, ‘but you can’t let the fear win, Zee. Right now this is our best option and each of your decisions, even possible mistakes, helps us learn. Do you understand?’

  Zee nodded and tried to hold this thought close while she worked. And as the hours went by, she did begin to feel more confident. Tiny signs and patterns revealed themselves to her and she incorporated them into her decisions. By late afternoon, she was able to clear twice as many patients an hour as she had at first. But no matter how many she processed, there were always more.

  She’d just sent a middle-aged man to critical care and was wondering if she could leave the floor long enough to find some juice to drink when she felt a sudden jolt of recognition. David Sutton was in the room, pushing his way through the crowd and coming straight towards her. He carried a child, a girl of about ten, who seemed to be fading in and out of consciousness. When he reached Zee, he held the girl out to her and said, ‘This one.’

  Zee didn’t need her empath skills to make the diagnosis. The girl was ashen and had the peculiar, sinking look of someone who was bleeding internally. She looked around the room. There were no available hospital trolleys but she was able to grab one of the doctors, who found a whee
lchair and took her to surgery himself. When she turned to David, his eyes were pleading.

  ‘There are more,’ he said, motioning to the human pool beyond the A&E doors. ‘A whole bus of children. The driver died at the wheel and they crashed.’

  ‘All injured?’

  ‘I can’t tell for certain but I’d say most of them.’

  ‘Bend down a little.’ Zee drew a swift green line on his forehead with the glow pen, then unpinned her own Emergency Worker Priority One badge and clipped it to his shirt. ‘That will get you in and out. Find anyone you can to help you get them in here as fast as possible.’

  She found the head A&E nurse and explained the situation to her, and by the time David and the volunteers he’d found started bringing them in, Zee had a special station set up in one of the exam rooms. Someone had miraculously found a trolley and two A&E nurses stood by ready to administer first aid.

  Over the next two hours, they got all thirty-three children off the bus and referred for treatment or release. David slid easily into step beside her, and seemed to anticipate what she needed without being told. The smoothness of the way they worked together in the cramped space, gave Zee a sense of calm wellbeing. In a way she couldn’t have explained, she felt stronger standing beside David.

  By the time they sent the last child off to have a broken arm set and gave up their space in the exam room, it was almost ten at night. A&E was still crowded, but there was no longer a crowd waiting outside and most of the outdoor triage stations had been dismantled. For the first time, there seemed to be enough staff to handle the flow, and Zee noticed that most of the volunteers had been sent home.

  ‘I guess I should be going too,’ David said.

  After the closeness she’d felt working beside him, Zee felt suddenly awkward. She reminded herself that he could have asked for her handheld number or her email address after their breakfast, or even mentioned getting together again, but he hadn’t. And now he was going to go again. Chance had brought them together twice, but it was only chance she reminded herself.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You were great with those kids.’ She wanted to touch him, to reach up and smooth the twist of hair that sprang away from his forehead like a question mark, to lean forward and rest her forehead against the pulse at the base of his throat. He was beautiful. How could it be that she would never see him again? ‘Really, I feel like you should get a special commendation or something.’ She tried to smile. ‘I mean, it isn’t even your planet and —’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘What?’

  He was looking at her intently now, staring straight into her eyes. ‘Is there somewhere we can go for a minute? Somewhere without all these people?’

  Something had changed. As discreetly as possible, she pulled the two small sensors from the nape of her neck and slid them into her pocket. Then, without a word, she led him to the only place she could think of: a tiny supply cupboard. There was barely enough room for them both.

  ‘Anyone would have helped with those kids,’ he said. ‘And . . . they weren’t even the real reason I came.’ He paused. ‘It was you. I had to make sure you were okay.’

  Tentatively, as if he weren’t sure it was what she wanted, he gathered her to him. Zee felt his arms go around her and felt the warmth of his back and shoulders under her own palms. For a long, delicious moment she let herself lean into him. Then she pulled back.

  ‘Why did you just vanish yesterday?’

  ‘Because this isn’t so good for you – being seen with an alien. I know what people say about us. Especially now, after the attack. It’s only a matter of time before someone blames us for the shock bombs.’

  ‘But you were here helping us.’

  ‘Maybe I was here watching, looking for weak spots in human response and defences.’

  ‘That’s not possible. You would never do something like that.’

  ‘But that’s what some people will believe.’

  Zee felt a shiver go up her spine. She had believed that too, but not any more.

  They stood for a long time, wrapped in each other’s arms, listening to each other’s heartbeat. After a while, Zee realised their hearts had found each other’s rhythm and were beating in unison.

  ‘What happens next?’ David finally asked. ‘With the anarchists?’

  ‘More shock bombs,’ Zee said. ‘That’s the usual pattern. They want to make sure we know it’s not over. Each time they wait just long enough, until we start to feel safe again, until people start to shop, ride the tube, visit museums, all the things they used to do. Then there’ll be another bomb.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Last time there were five.’

  He was quiet for a long time. Eventually he murmured, ‘I should go now. Really.’ But he kept holding her.

  ‘I want to see you again, David.’

  She felt his chest expand, then contract with a slow sigh. ‘I want to see you again, Zee. But it’s too dangerous for you.’

  She surprised them both by laughing.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.

  ‘We just worked a shock bomb clean-up together. We live in a city that’s in for months of threats and alerts and more bombings. How many people died today? Are going to die because of today? And you think you are the big Be Afraid in my life?’ She laid her cheek against his chest. ‘What if one of us dies in the next blast? What if both of us die, and we never got to be together at all?’

  Zee lingered by the A&E doors as he left. Day had settled into night and there were still small clusters of people in the ambulance bay. Just before he disappeared into the darkness beyond, he turned back and saw her standing by the doors. He raised his hand and she raised hers.

  This time she knew he wouldn’t vanish.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE GIRL WITH WATERFALL HAIR

  Zee had forgotten all the things that came in the wake of a shock bomb – the worried calls from her parents and emails from Jasmine asking if she and Rani were all right, the empty streets that took twice as long to navigate because of all the security checkpoints, the slow work of matching unidentified victims with missing persons reports.

  London was all but cut off as anti-anarchist forces searched for anyone who might be connected to the attack. Only a few tube lines were running and the vactrains – the trains that flew through vacuum tunnels beneath the old BritRail tracks – had been shut down, along with the airports. There was no public transport in or out of London, and making it past the checkpoints in a private car required a pass. People kept showing up at the hospital, convinced they’d been in the blast range when mostly they were just lonely and frightened. They all needed to be screened and diagnosed, and over the next few days Zee worked until she swayed on her feet with exhaustion. Other than a few hours snatched here and there, she didn’t get another real day off for almost two weeks, and the week after that, when the vactrains were running again, she and David had their first date.

  They hadn’t had much time to talk since the shock bomb, and the thread of magic they’d found in the supply cupboard began to seem a bit unreal. After all, David was older than she was, and had just turned nineteen. For all she knew, she might be just one of many girls in his world. Worlds, to be accurate. He might have someone waiting for him on his planet, Omura. To him, Zee might be like the sweets you ate on holiday, something that didn’t really count.

  Even so, she was looking forward to seeing him again. ‘I want to do something fun,’ he’d told her. ‘Not productive or useful or educational. Just fun.’

  Fun was in short supply on results-oriented Omura, he’d explained. People stayed fit by completing two short, highly effective workouts a day. They ate food manufactured for nutrition and all their music was educational, featuring lyrics that helped people remember things like the bones of the body or maths formulas. In their free time, they formed teams and held contests to see who could pick up the most litter or submit the best solution for a traffic-flow problem
.

  ‘You mean you don’t do anything just for fun?’ asked Zee. ‘You don’t go barefoot in wet grass? Or do things that make you feel like the world is bigger and more interesting than you thought it was? Like travel?’

  ‘There’s no reason to travel any more,’ David explained. ‘The CGA, our Central Governing Authority, stabilised the planet several hundred years ago. The climate is pleasant and uniform from pole to pole. Everyone speaks the same language and has the same goals. There’s nothing you can get in one place on Omura that you can’t get everywhere else. This frees us to carry forward our technology and our research. It’s why we’re so far ahead of you, even though intelligent life began in both places about the same time.’

  ‘Then why —’

  ‘Why are we here studying your arts and music? Even Nancy Drew and nail polish colours? Because in some way we can’t understand, all this inefficiency seems to make you more efficient at the one thing that truly matters.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Surviving. Our population is shrinking. No one’s interested in having children. Or in anything, really. By eliminating inefficiency, we’ve made true equality possible. Everyone on the planet has the same resources and options. No one goes without. We’re freer than ever to carry our research and technology forward, but no one seems to care. The more inefficiency we eliminate, the fewer new ideas we get. And when setbacks occur, instead of solving the problem, teams scrap the project and refuse to work on it again. Somehow, all your inefficiencies make you want to live, and wanting to live gives you new ideas.’

  ‘But you’re not like that,’ Zee protested.

  ‘No, that’s why I’m here. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, Omura took the wrong evolutionary turn. And now, rather than die out, we’re trying to learn. So help me with the experiment. Let’s do something that’s just for fun.’