Damocles (23 page)

“Cold,” she said. Of course, she had stripped off her shirt in the storm.

“Shirt?” he asked, looking toward her shelter where he knew she kept another.

“No. Loul.” She leaned forward enough that he could turn and look into her face. She slid one thin hand around the inside of his arm, pushing until she was fully entwined with his. She rested her chin on his shoulder and pressed her forehead into the thin hair at his temple. He could feel and hear her breath in his ear.

“Loul is okay. Loul is…” With her free hand she flicked at the corner of the light screen, spinning it around to adjust to her
new position. Her hand hovered over the buttons until she found what she wanted, looking to make sure Loul could see too. “Loul is safe. Meg is safe.”

She was freezing but that wasn’t why she climbed over to Loul’s side of the table. She slithered out and under the table because she couldn’t take another minute of listening to the low pitch and roll of his thrum, rising and dropping like a hummed sob in his throat. She’d never heard him make that sound, had never heard any of them make it, and it pushed into her heart like a nail until she had to move, had to do something to soothe it, to silence it. She didn’t know if touching Loul would help or make him more uncomfortable. He was already unhappy with her, that she knew, but she was sorry and scared she would lose him. Her skin felt chafed and sore from the mud slides. She was hungry and cold but most of all she felt as if she had brutalized her new friend with her silence. If she couldn’t explain with words, she’d explain with warmth, with sheer proximity.

The rough cloth of his shirt scratched her skin, but she wrapped her arm around his anyway, resting her chin on his shoulder. She could see the dark skin beneath his ear flush darker when she breathed on it and was thankful for Cho’s warning. At the moment, she very much wanted to brush her lips against that dark, pulsing skin. It wasn’t a sexual compulsion, it just seemed intimate. Instead she leaned her head against his and assured him that he was safe. They were both safe. When Loul didn’t pull away, she decided to try a new concept.

Meg turned her head on his shoulder, her cheek near his, and looked down at the screen. The hand that didn’t grip his arm swept away the red boxes in the middle of the screen, opening up a new empty box. She had a new word or concept she wanted to teach him. He waved his knuckles toward each other with a faint movement, a half-hearted yes. He also didn’t want to accidentally yank her arm where it was wrapped around his. He could feel her fingers settle into his bicep, not squeezing but just taking their place, and he had to admit, he liked the sensation.

Meg’s fingers flitted along the side of the screen, lines and symbols flying by in a blur. She flicked and pushed, shifting boxes within boxes, looking for something in what he understood to be the Urfers’ database. It seemed to him to hold an enormous amount of data, and her fingers flew through the labels. She found what she wanted, drawing a data box onto the middle of the screen. A few more flicks and the box filled with other boxes; photographs, Loul knew. The pictures were tiny, impossible to make out, but Meg seemed able to sort through them. They’d used photos before for simple vocabulary words and Loul had always hoped she would show him more pictures of Urf.

The picture she opened wasn’t a photograph but a graphic. Her language program had a lot of those, simplified images of basic objects. It made sense although they’d both had a few laughs when what was a basic object to Meg had completely confounded Loul. This time, he knew what the picture was supposed to be—a man and a woman. It was funny to see the Urfer rendition of male and female, skinny and long like the Urfers themselves. A few more flicks of her finger and two smaller people appeared between the man and woman. Meg kept shifting through the
data and pulled out what he recognized as audio commands, lining them up beneath the figures and pressing the buttons.

“Mother. Father.” It was Effan One’s voice. “Child. Children. Family.” She must have recorded these words with Cho when discussing gender and reproduction. When Meg and Cho went into stasis, he spent most of his time with the Effans, listening to them gush about the information they were learning. This vocabulary had already been established. Why was Meg bringing it up now?

She waved her hand over the image of the family. “Loul family?”

Loul jerked away from her, not caring if he jerked her arm clean off her body. He pushed away, fear punching into his stomach as he scrabbled from the booth, putting the table between them. Meg’s eyes were wide, her hands held palms up in what he knew meant no danger. He’d seen the Urfers use that posture before, usually when they’d startled someone on the work site sneaking up behind them with that silent glide of theirs.

His voice poured from her speaker patch in broken phrases, just pieces of “Loul no. Meg no good. No Meg. What this? No Loul move.” He swung his fists through the air, the sign to be quiet. He needed her to be quiet. He needed to not hear her words in his voice.

She said nothing for several moments, letting him stand there and pound his fists into his hips, thinking. When she moved, it was with that very slow movement he knew they only used when they needed to make a point or when the work crews had been startled. He used to think the slow movement was soothing, a way to give the Dideto a chance to follow along. Now there seemed to be something dangerous in slow grace. Her hands floated over the light screen.

“Loul? What? Meg need/want ask. Family is no good?”

He couldn’t believe how still she could sit. He watched her, staring at her, not blinking and trying to wait her out but he knew he couldn’t. It was like they could turn to stone if they wanted. Loul unclenched his fists, trying to relax. He had a question he had to ask and it scared him. The possibility scared him breathless but the thought of not knowing scared him more.

“How did you know?”

This wasn’t in their vocabulary; he knew that but he had to ask the question anyway. Meg’s head tilted just a fraction, an involuntary sign of confusion. She kept her eyes on him, even her blinks slow and controlled. She bobbed her head slightly, asking him to repeat.

He leaned in toward the table. It was stupid, he knew, to have jerked away like that. If it was true, if she could read his mind, she’d have seen it coming. She would know what he was doing right now. She wouldn’t have been confused by the question. The more he thought about it, the more absurd the idea became but he had to ask anyway. He had to find a way to make her understand.

He crouched beside the table. He wanted to sit back down but he didn’t really want to be sitting beside Meg when he asked the question because, for one thing, it hurt his neck trying to turn to see and, for another, if the answer turned out to be yes he couldn’t trust himself not to leap out of the booth again and look like an idiot. At the same time, he didn’t want to sit on the other side of the booth because, well, Meg had climbed over to his side to be close to him. To purposefully move away from her, even after he’d just jumped away, seemed rude. Loul ground his teeth at his own absurdity.

“Meg.” He gripped the table tight and saw her draw into herself, her shoulder carriage stiff in that way that meant she was not relaxed. She stared hard into his eyes and he could just make
out the edge of sharp white teeth biting her lower lip. “Loul need/want know. Meg, um, Loul talks, yes?” She tapped the
yes
button, her lip whitening where her teeth pressed against it. “Loul talks and Meg, um”—he tapped his ear—“Meg hears, yes?”

“Yes.” She spoke, her head tipping and bobbing forward, her neck looser now, telling Loul that she was really listening to him. When Meg listened, she listened with her whole body, which was part of the point of his question.

He hit the question mark and tried to phrase the next part right. “Does Meg hear, uh, Loul no talk?” She bobbed her head and he repeated the nonsensical question. No sign that she got it. He crouched down closer to the table, getting more engrossed in communicating the concept than in his fear of the concept itself. “Let’s try this,” he muttered. He looked at Meg. He pointed to his mouth. “Loul talks words, yes?”

She tapped her knuckles.

“There are words here.” He pointed to his mouth. “Yes? Words here?”

She tapped her knuckles again. Somewhere during his questions they had come to lean in closer to each other. Loul watched her pupils widen as he tapped the side of his head.

“And words here.” He tapped his skull. “Loul talks here. Yes?”

Her fingers slid near the
yes
button. She wanted him to continue to explain. He couldn’t have stopped if he’d tried.

His voice was thin and tense as he whispered his question to Meg. “Does Meg hear Loul talk words here?” He tapped his skull. “Does Meg hear words Loul talks here?”

Her shoulders dropped and a soft breath blew from her open mouth. Meg’s whole body collapsed into a relaxed slouch. Loul knew this meant she had understood him. What he didn’t know was what her answer was going to be. He didn’t know how she would react to it.

She laughed. She laughed a breathy laugh that turned into a choppy laugh. Her head fell back, showing all her teeth, and her flat palms smacked together in a loud slap. Of all the reactions he’d expected, this wasn’t one of them. She covered her wide-open mouth with her fingers and kept laughing long enough for him to wonder if she was laughing at him rather than in relief at understanding him. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than she reached for him, wrapping her fingers around his hands where they clutched the table and leaning in close.

“No,” she said through a smile. “Meg no hear words here.” Her fingers brushed the side of his head. “Loul hear Meg talk here?”

“No,” he said. “Of course not. But how do you know? How…” He pressed the question mark again then touched his head. “Loul talked here about family and Meg asks family. Loul is not okay and Meg asks why Loul is not okay. How? Meg hears words, yes?”

“No. Meg hears…” She bit her lip again, her hand hovering near his face. Her fingers trembled, hesitating. “Meg hears this.” And very softly she slid her fingers across his rose spot.

She remembers a dance at Queen of Heaven School. She and her sister, Maddie, were in C School so they couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen years old. It was their first “real” dance, with boys and shadows and slow dancing. Clayton Harvey had asked her to dance just like Maddie said he would. Maddie said Clayton had a crush on her, and while it had been almost impossible to believe, Clayton Harvey being Clayton Harvey, Meg had believed her. Meg always believed Maddie because even though they were twins and did almost everything together, Maddie always seemed to know so much more than Meg. She made it through the first dance without
throwing up on herself or tripping, and then, unbelievably, Clayton Harvey asked her to keep on dancing with him. And it was a slow song, a really slow song, “Cries in the Dark,” which everyone knew was a super sexy song, although Meg didn’t really know what was so sexy about it. But when she wrapped her arms around Clayton Harvey’s neck and he wrapped his arms around her waist, his hand coming really close to her butt, she started to get the appeal of the song. They danced the whole song like that, getting closer and closer even though they were touching almost everywhere from shoulder to knee. And then she’d heard Clayton’s breath catch and felt him go tense where he stood and when she pulled her head back, she saw a look on Clayton Harvey’s face that she would never forget. Especially since he dropped his arms and ran off the dance floor, leaving her standing there like a dork.

Maddie had laughed and laughed, explaining to Meg in the bathroom what had happened, and for the countless time Meg had wondered how her twin knew these kinds of things. She wondered why if it had felt so good to him would he look so terrified. Of course, that was a lot of years ago and Meg had eventually caught up to her sister in such matters, but she still keenly remembered that white-eyed look on Clayton Harvey’s face during that first slow dance.

All these years later, she was seeing it again. Loul didn’t have Clayton Harvey’s apple cheeks or baby-blue eyes, and he probably wasn’t about to go off in his pants, but Meg knew that look. She was still able to draw that look from Cho on the rare occasions they had the opportunity to get a little adventurous. She knew, or at least she hoped, Loul wouldn’t act on the gesture since from what Cho had told her the logistics would be awkward at best. But Loul had asked where she heard his thoughts. He wanted to know how she gauged his feelings. She had lied to him enough. For this, she would tell him the truth.

She drew her hand away from the pulse point, hearing his thrum stutter in surprise, then settle into a steady yet higher pitch. She sat back down in her seat, tucking her hands under the table in hopes that if they were out of sight it would somehow lessen whatever embarrassment Loul might be feeling. She didn’t know what embarrassment looked like on him; she wasn’t sure if she’d seen it yet. She’d seen surprise and bewilderment and anger, but if he’d ever been embarrassed around her, he’d hidden it. He was hiding it now unless it looked a lot like happy wonder.

Loul climbed back into the booth beside her, turning his body so his back was to the small dividing wall and he could face her more easily. He put his finger against the dark pulse point and for one awkward second Meg didn’t know if it was her turn to be embarrassed.

“Meg hears words here?”

Apparently they were going forward. Good. “No words. Meg hears…Meg hears.”

“What hears?”

How could she describe it? She couldn’t make that sound in her own throat. The closest she could come was a hum, a deep vibrating hum, like the kind the therapist had taught her to make for meditation. She knew Loul could hear the sound in his earpiece, and she raised the tone, humming a tune she thought might be Mozart. She hummed until her throat started to itch, then she opened her mouth and la-la-la’d a few notes. She was way off the real sound of the thrums but something in the music came closer to explaining it.