Living in Threes (28 page)

Lyra’s brows lifted. “Really?”

“It’s not,” Meru said. “It’s all me. I’m the one you need to punish.”

“We owe you a great debt,” said Lyra.

“I owe you an apology,” Meru said, “and probably a prison sentence.”

“You think so?” Lyra asked.

“I broke too many laws to count,” said Meru.

“So you did,” said Lyra. “You also found the source of the virus. The tomb in which it originated was one of the very first experiments in stasis, nearly four thousand years ago. At some point, perhaps several points, materials were removed from the tomb and preserved in their own, much smaller stasis fields.”

“Flowers,” Meru said.

“Flowers,” Lyra agreed, “taken as remembrances and sold to collectors among the worlds. It was a fashion for a whole season, a craze that ran from end to end of human space. One of them, it seems, carried a fragment of the virus. But now we have the key. We have some hope of stopping it.”

“I would hope for more,” said Meru.

“So do we all,” said Lyra.

She flickered and went out.

In a way Meru was disappointed. She had known better than to think that anyone could find a cure in a day. But she had dreamed that there was one, and Vekaa found it.

“Dreams can be true,” Meritre said from the end of another plague, thousands and thousands of years ago.

“Then I’ll try to keep on dreaming,” said Meru, “and hoping, too. That they find the cure. That I haven’t lost the stars. For me or for my friend.”

“They owe you both for saving the world,” Meredith said. “You can remind them that if they send you to starpilots’ school, you’ll be someone else’s problem.”

Meru laughed painfully. “That might actually work,” she said.

“Can’t hurt to try,” said Meredith.

Certainly it could not hurt worse than anything else Meru had done or felt since her mother’s message shook her out of her safe and comfortable world. She would try, she thought. She would do her best to succeed. After all, as Meredith said, she had saved the world.

Chapter 26

So that was what saving the world felt like. It felt empty.

Maybe it wasn’t the flowers. Maybe it was all my fault. I might be carrying it right now, a string of molecules that would drift around the planet, replicating harmlessly, until one day it mutated. Then it mutated again and again, till one of the mutations turned toxic. After that, nobody could stop it.

Consensus would find a cure, now it knew exactly what it was dealing with. The epidemic would end; people would stop dying. Earth would be safe again.

I told myself Meru would be safe, too. She’d talk her way out of Containment and into starpilots’ school, and get Yoshi out, too, and they’d end up sailing living ships across the stars. Meanwhile, on the other end of time, Meritre would sing the princess into her tomb, help her mother deliver the little brother or sister they all waited for with such fear and hope, marry her scribe and go on to live a long—for ancient Egypt—and happy life.

I could see their whole lives ahead of them, but when I looked at my own, I couldn’t see past next week.

Maybe I was wrong, and all the huddling and whispering wasn’t about Mom after all. Maybe I’d misheard. Maybe I was completely delusional.

Suppose I wasn’t. Suppose Mom really wasn’t going to make it. Dad and Aunt Jessie and Kelly had to figure out what to do with me.

They all had their own lives. Nobody wanted me. All I wanted was Mom.

I tried to call Mom, but she wasn’t answering. Her voicemail was full.

I called Cat, and didn’t even get to voicemail.
Out of service area,
the snide little voice buzzed in my ear. I started to punch a text, couldn’t even get the words to make sense. I threw the phone across the room and pulled the covers up over my head.

There were still people inside it. Meritre and Meru didn’t invite me to a pity party. They were just there, being me, the same way I couldn’t help but be them.

Nobody ever said reincarnation was like that. You either got hypnotized and discovered you were Attila the Hun, or had weird memories that turned out to be from past lives. Remembering future lives, or being able to talk to yourself on either end, was straight off the edge.

“Meredith?”

Aunt Jessie usually sounds cranky when she’s trying to be sympathetic. When she actually sounds sympathetic, that’s not good at all.

I must have fallen asleep. I’d kicked the covers off and they were all twisted up at the foot of the bed. For a while I couldn’t remember what day it was, or when I’d gone to bed.

It must be morning. I vaguely remembered it being dark, and now there was light through the blinds. The little tortie cat was curled up in her usual spot next to my pillow.

I rubbed the crusties out of my eyes. Aunt Jessie was wearing slacks and a blouse instead of dig clothes. “Is it Friday?” I asked.

She shook her head. Now she looked, as well as sounded, cranky. It didn’t make me feel any better. “Meredith, I have something to tell you. If you’d rather have a shower and breakfast first—”

I sat up. My stomach had dropped around my ankles. “It’s Mom, isn’t it? Is she—”

“She went into a coma last night,” Aunt Jessie said. “Your dad and Kelly left early this morning. You and I are flying out at noon. I’ll help you pack.”

I stared at her. What was swelling up in me didn’t feel like anger. It felt like nothing I’d ever felt before. “What about the site? What about the tomb? You can’t just leave it like that. You have to—”

“Meredith,” she said. Sympathetic was bad, but quiet was worse. It cut me off in mid-rant. “Don’t worry about it. It’s all taken care of.”

“What do you mean? Why didn’t you wake me up? Why didn’t you tell me? I could have gone with Dad and Kelly. What if we don’t get there in time?”

Aunt Jessie’s face looked made of wax. “They already had tickets for the day after tomorrow—they were able to get them changed. I got us the first flights we could get together. You needed to sleep, and there wasn’t anything you could do. Now hurry up and get dressed while I pack your suitcase. We’re leaving in an hour.”

“It’s already packed,” I said.

She nodded. She didn’t seem at all surprised. “Do what you need to get ready, then come down for breakfast. You’re going to need it. We have a long trip ahead of us.”

It took us most of two days to get to Florida. I don’t remember much of it. When we were on the ground, Aunt Jessie was on the phone, checking in with the doctors and then with Dad and Kelly after they got there. In between those calls, she talked to Gwyn, whom she’d left in charge of the site, and Sayyid, who was keeping an eye on the passage and the tomb.

I didn’t touch my own phone, much. When people called, I couldn’t seem to find any words. After a while my friends said, “We’ll see you when you get here.” And left me alone.

Cat had got into the hospice. All she could tell me was what Aunt Jessie and Dad and Kelly had. And the other thing, the thing that mostly went without saying:
I’m here. I’ll always be here. No matter what happens.

I talked to Dad once, but somehow I felt better talking to Kelly. Maybe because she was almost a stranger, and a doctor, she knew how to put things so I didn’t get them all messed up.

She didn’t try to pretend that everything was going to be just fine. Not that even doctors can really predict, or miracles can’t happen, but we all knew. This was it.

The Triple was useless. Meritre could pray if she wanted to. Meru was busy dealing with her own mother’s death.

It did kind of help on those endless plane rides and those equally endless hours of waiting in airports, to either sit on the roof with Meritre and drink beer and eat Egyptian food, or roam the far-future web with Meru. Sometimes when I tried to sleep, I’d hear Meritre’s cat purring, or else it was the starwing.

I missed the little cat from Luxor. I wondered if I’d ever see her again.

Sometimes I’d feel Bonnie close by. That was the one thing I looked forward to. If I was home, I could see Bonnie. I could bury my face in her mane and let go and cry till there were no tears left.

Mom was still alive when we got there. In the two weeks since I left, she’d gone from thin but apparently healthy to a stick figure in a hospice bed.

The hospice was nice. It was a house by the river, and the rooms were cool and quiet. Palm trees grew all around it; hibiscus bloomed along the walls and in the yard. There were orange and grapefruit trees, and a lemon tree beside the back door.

Mom’s room looked down the river. She must have loved that while she was awake.

A big bouquet of roses sat on the table beside her bed. Cat’s stepmom had acres of rosebushes, and these were some of Mom’s favorites: all shades of lavender and yellow and white. They filled the room with a beautiful smell.

It almost covered the smell of cancer, that Meritre would call the smell of death.

Meritre was four thousand years dead. She was still alive inside me. But then
I
was dead compared to Meru.

How final is death, if you can come back and live a whole other life?

Final enough, I answered myself, for the people who love you in the life you’re in. If Mom came back, she wouldn’t be Mom any more. This was all I had of her, and all I’d ever get.

Cat had gone to the barn for morning chores. Aunt Jessie and Dad and Kelly were in the conference room talking to doctors. I was alone with Mom and the monitors.

Nothing in there was keeping her alive; she didn’t want that. She had a little oxygen was all, and an IV with pain meds, to keep her comfortable.

That was how the nurses put it. “To keep her comfortable.” By that they meant, so she wouldn’t be in too much agony before she died.

Her hand felt like twigs wrapped in a thin leather glove. It was cold. I tried to warm it, but it was past that.

Maybe she knew I was there. People in a coma could hear, Kelly’d told me. That was why there was music playing, Mom’s favorites: Beatles and show tunes and indie rock and medieval greatest hits.

Meritre was in the temple with the choir, while priests moved through a long and complicated ritual. Aweret wasn’t the only person in that family with a wonderful voice. Meritre’s made the small hairs lift on the back of my neck, it was so clear and high and perfect.