The End Has Come

But after forty years, he was family. He’d been a gangly fifteen-year-old when the lab-coats captured him. Shivering and crying, he had webbed his fingers to reach toward her hand against the sheet of glass.

Nayima missed skin. She felt sorry for the new children, being raised not to touch. She absently ran her fingertips along the dirt-packed ridges in the tire’s warm rubber.

“Do you have meat?” she said.

“Five pounds of dried beef,” he said. Nayima didn’t care much for beef, but meat was meat. “In the back of the truck. And a couple of water barrels.”

Water barrels? A gift that large probably wasn’t from Raul alone, and she didn’t like owing anyone.

“From Sacramento?”

“You’re doing a school talk today, I heard. Liaison’s office asked me to come out.”

Nayima’s temper flared. She could swear she’d felt a ping at her right temple an hour before, waking her from fractured sleep. The lab-coats denied that they abused her tracking chip, but was it a coincidence she had a school obligation that day? And how dare they send so little water!

Nayima was so angry that her first words came in Spanish, because she wanted Raul’s full attention. He had taught her Spanish, just as she had taught him so much else, patient lessons through locked doors. “Que me deben créditos, Raul. They owe a lot more than two barrels.”

“You’ll get your créditos. This is just . . .” He waved his hand, summoning the right word. Then he gave up. “Por favor, Nayima. Take them. You earned them.” He tested the air pressure in his tire with a pound of his fist. “Gracias a Díos this is okay.”

Nayima’s shaky faith had been shattered during the Plague, but Raul still held fast to his God. He told us the Apocalypse was coming in Revelation, he always said, as if that excused it all. Nayima still believed Sunday dinner should be special, but only to honor the memory of her grandmother’s weekly feasts.

Two new orange water barrels stood in the bed of Raul’s truck. Large ones. She needed more credits to get her faucets running, but the barrels would last a while. Nayima climbed up, grabbing the bed’s door to swing her leg over. She winced at the pain in her knees as she landed. She treasured the freedom to move her body, but movement came with a cost.

“¿Estás bien, querida?” Raul said.

“Just my knees. Stop fussing.”

Nayima fumbled with an unmarked plastic crate tied beside the closest barrel.

“Don’t open that yet,” Raul said.

But she already had. Inside, she found the beef, wrapped in paper and twine. Still not quite dry, judging by the grease spots.

But she forgot the jerky when she saw two dolls, both long-haired girls, one with brown skin, one white. The dolls’ hands were painted with blue plastic gloves, but nothing else. They had lost their clothes, lying atop a folded, obscenely pink blanket.

“What the hell’s this?” Nayima said.

Raul walked closer as if he carried a heavy sack of across his shoulders. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said, voice low. He reached toward her. “Come down. Walk with me.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “Why is Sacramento sending me dolls?”

“Bejar de la truck,” Raul insisted. “Por favor. Let’s walk. I have to tell you something.”

Nayima was certain Raul had sold her out in some way, she just couldn’t guess how. Raul had always been more willing to play political games; he’d been so much younger when he’d been found, raised without knowing any better. So Raul’s house had expensive solar panels that kept his water piping hot and other niceties she did not bother to covet. His old pickup truck, which ran on precious ethanol and gasoline, was another of his luxuries for the extra time and blood he was always willing to give the lab-coats.

Nayima climbed out of the truck more carefully than she’d climbed in, refusing Raul’s aid. Living in small spaces for most of her life had left her joints irritable and stiff, even with daily exercises to loosen them. If she’d had the energy or balance, she would have shoved Raul down on his ass.

“Start talking,” she said. “What have you done?”

“Put the gun down first.”

Nayima hadn’t realized she was pointing the shotgun at him. She lowered it. “Tell me ahora, Raul. No hay más secretos.” Raul’s secrets stung more than anyone else’s.

“I won a ruling,” Raul said.

“About what? Free toys?”

Raul stared out toward the thirsty grasslands. “I have a library portal at my house . . .” he began.

Of course he did. Toys and gadgets. That was Raul.

Raul went on. “I did some research on . . . the embryos.”

Nayima’s cheek flared as if he’d struck her. During Reconciliation, she and Raul had learned that dozens of embryos had been created from her eggs and his sperm, more than they’d known. They had been the cocktail du jour; something about their blood types. Her heart gave a sudden sick tumbling in her chest, as if to drown him out.

“There’s a bebé, Nayima,” he said, whispering like wind. “One survived.”

The world went white. Her eyesight, her thoughts, lost.

“What? When?”