Four Times Blessed Read online

  Chapter 4

  The spicy green smell is still pumping out of the draping branches, life lingering in the broken limbs. Leaves and ferns and grass all tangy, wet and warm, like the herbs my aunt’ll be pounding away on back at the meetinghouse. She tells me it’s one of her favorite tasks and an excellent way to start the morning. Therapeutic, she’ll grin and tell you. Crushing herbs, spices, seeds, grains, anything really. Everyone should do it, in her opinion. I wonder if that’s what God was thinking last night.

  Either way, it looks like He had fun. I have to be extra careful so I don’t trip over any plumes of stripped leaves, or scratch my corneas on the bits of limb spitting out at unnatural angles that honestly look pretty painful.

  I feel bad, but it’s always this way after a big storm. Little storms, we’re fine. Big ones, though, as in the kind that make it seem like everything is shrunken down so it’s easier to smash, then all resized by some kind of magic, those do leave a mark on the island. I swear, I sometimes wonder how there’re any trees left at all, let alone a whole woods full of them.

  It’s an eight minute and thirty second journey, approximately. If you’re sprinting. I know that because when I forgot my badge that time, the clock tower told me it took seventeen minutes to go from there to home to back there.

  I cross the airfield and the breeze hollows out by the base’s walls, sky clear all around, light distilled to a nice lemon juice color. It’s a lovely place, but it’s annoying that it’s here. It turns my insides to hot pepper jelly if I accidentally remember this is the actual place where my mother died. Where one minute she was, and then she was dead.

  I wasn’t there, but the way I imagine it is just like a memory. I see the matte sky, dark and trembling. Her running, wild. In the throes of a Founders’ Syndrome flare. I see the tree limbs whipping far away, then the bolt of lightning that struck her. I stop thinking about that.

  At the gates, I take one last glimpse over my shoulder, like I always do before heading down to Subbasement E West: AIS Laboratories. My aunt agrees that it’s important to take one last look before going into a subbasement. Actually, she doesn’t like subbasements in general. She sees no reason for a basement to need its very own basement.

  I can’t say I get it any more than she does.

  Anywho, from the middle of it, the airfield doesn’t look like it does in my memory, and it does make me happy to see our town spilling out of the little oval pocket below. Followed by the steep green slopes, and finally the beach and the bluffs and the docks before the sea.

  The gates let me pass through them with a little puff, and I enter the busy courtyard. I keep my head up and dance through the streaming crowds to the main tower, the one with the clock and the bells. There, I take one last deep breath of muggy air and pass into the central air-conditioning and fluorescent lights. Nobody else follows me in, so the door sucks shut. I let out my breath into the fierce tundra of a lobby. Seriously, I should be wearing my winter field uniform in this place. Black and white cameo and all.

  My next inhalation reminds me of crinkled paper and stale crackers.

  Chunky regulation high-heels clomping on the floor, I go and type my PSID into the touchpad by the furthest door on the left. The one that leads to the Academic Support areas. There are quite a few other little doors and two wider ones, one to communication-broadcasting headquarters and the other to military headquarters. I’ve never visited either of those, but I’ve seen them from outside. Broadcasting is housed in the top twenty floors of the main tower, right above the barracks, and Military HQ connects by tunnels and takes up all the low lying buildings encircling the courtyard.

  With a click and a hiss, the red light above my door turns green. I yank the chilly handle twice before it even unlatches. Because I learned the hard way that it’s really not fun trying to prove you’re not an illegal alien or a terrorist with your face and other temperature-sensitive parts smashed into a floor that has to be I swear five decrees C.

  Today, though, I wrestle the meter-thick door slab ajar and slip through without incident.

  There’s a ratcheting sound as it slinks closed behind me. A light by this side of the door blinks yellow three times, letting me know it knows I’m here. It’ll let me out again at five.

  Just the right amount of minutes early, I enter the crisp white hallway and head to the break room through the first door on the right.

  I go to the sink and take a paper towel to wipe some of the butter off of my bread. I’m pretty sure I would get sick if I ate all that, but maybe to my Uncle Groton it didn’t seem like much.

  I take a cup and stick it in the old microwave the guys in engineering fixed up for fun to heat up some water for tea. I close my eyes and slump in one of the plastic chairs while it hums away.

  I jump when someone opens the door from the outside.

  Forefathers.

  Of course the person who finds me sitting around and making tea is my advisor, who is also the dean of the whole entire department. He clacks over the threshold and I stand to the side, back against the wall, eyes straight ahead.

  The microwave beeps.

  My water’s done.

  I hold my breath to keep from glancing over.

  “Good morning, Specialist…” he looks me up and down, “Highlands.” Highlands isn’t my last name. My zizi got slightly overwhelmed, she says, when she was doing all the paperwork for me to start at the academy, so somehow she ended up putting the name of our island in the last name boxes. It’s worked out just as well. And even if it isn’t actually my name, it’s rather thrilling being referred to by a name, at least, rather than Student, Support Girl, or other less pretty words.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  It’s the appropriate response. It can all be found in the M.S.A. Military Support Handbook, Chapter 5: Appropriate Communication Behavior for M.S.A. Scholars. Part B: Verbal Behavior Code.

  The dean is at the table and looking into a box half full of pastries. “You’re the one that’s a native here, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ll have to stop by Anthropology and say hello to Steve, Dr. Nicholai. He does all kinds of interesting studies on the native populations of the island colonies. He’s even lived in an island village for a year, did you know that? Fascinating stuff, I even read it myself. It’s published online, free access.”

  “Yes, sir, I will, sir.”

  “So, are you married yet? Dr. Nicholai’s study says in native clans, elders often marry off children before they let them leave their island,” the dean, Dr. Preston is his name, says with a mouth full of something dry and dense and sweetly chocolate.

  “No, sir. I was engaged before I left, though, sir. The marriage will be this fall, sir.”

  “Well, you have my congratulations, then, dear. I read colonists often marry fellow islanders. Is yours from here?”

  He sure has lots of questions. And lots to say to a lowly specialist like me. It’s a little odd, but then it’s probably what makes him a good dean.

  I try to make him happy by talking, “Oh, no, sir. We don’t marry people from the same island, sir, but we do marry those from other islands. Sir.”

  He taps a thin foil tube into a cup of hot water. He stirs it with a teeny stick. “Hm, well I suppose even with the founders’ effect, it’s possible the genetic diversity is sufficient to yield a number of viable offspring that would allow for a sustainable population. I read one study that said the miscarriage rate of females fifteen to thirty-five on one island, not this one, a Quebequian one, I think, the miscarriage rate was sixty-four point seven percent among confirmed pregnancies.”

  “Yes, sir. My fiancé’s not from the islands, though, sir. He’s from New York State, sir.”

  “An M.S.A. state citizen? That’s good to hear, Specialist Highlands. How did you manage that?”

  “My mother arranged it, sir. She worked as a maid here, actually, sir, over in communicati
on-broadcasting, so she visited lots of places, sir.”

  “Oh, my. Well, quite the quaint customs you island people have. But I suppose that’s what you have to do when you can’t weed out the bad eggs, eh? All the best to you. I hope you have numerous viable offspring, as they say!” He laughs. I wonder who on earth they is. Probably just him, I think.

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “I’m running several important trials on the P. c. crucifer investigation today. You’re welcome to come and observe when you finish.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  There is no way in hell that I’m doing that.

  I’ve already had my fill of P. c. crucifers, you see. Last semester, we were all working on our senior theses, and mine was entitled Modern Climate Change and Its Effect On Mating Calls of P. c. crucifer (the Northern Peep Frog).

  Dr. Preston just happens to be the leading expert on the squishy little amphibs, and was accepting student research assistants. He wrote me a short recommendation, but it was just right because he’s the one that he was recommending me to.

  Unfortunately, that meant I spent every night of spring semester camped out in a tick-infested swamp on Long Island with the incessant creaking of the peep frogs and the creepy ghosts of the forefathers, recording data and emailing it to the good doctor.

  Let’s just say that if this whole thing my mother set up doesn’t work out, I’ll have no trouble finding a nice peep frog husband on account of I know more about what songs turn those boys on than any decent Homo sapiens girl ever should.

  “Dismissed.”

  My tea…

  “Yes, sir.”

  I turn on my heel, stick my bread in my teeth to free up both hands, shove the ridiculous door, and walk quickly down the hall, down, down, down the staircase, and into my lab.

  It’s a little thing. Standard issue for the modalities I work in. That was one of the first tests I took during swab summer, along with the fifteen-hundred meter run and general language and whatnot. I came out as primary auditory, with secondary visual, so this is all I need.

  Just a soundproof booth on one side, a workspace on the other. But when I turn on the programs, the room fills with music that resounds as if it were my favorite concert hall in New York City. I just connect my slate to the big computers, open the problem sets they’ve sent me, and listen. Any information can go into the program, I don’t know, I don’t get most of it, despite the academy’s general education coursework. Usually it’s just tagged as General Military, General Oceanography, whatever. What I do get is the music. The orchestra, that I’m partial to.

  I listen to what it tells me. I do some acoustic analysis, and then I email in my lab reports. To input, all I have to do is take my chalk, write some music into the slate, then stand on the box and imagine a full orchestra before me. Then I conduct. It can be hard, but I really do love the music.